I took the rest of that Thursday and the full Friday off for my hobbies. Honestly, I had, for the time being, enough of physics, and needed the break.

Saturday though was the K4 meeting. The meeting itself was mostly pleasant. Except for Jason, naturally. Though even he was gushing about the new computing power he had available.

It was somewhat cute how they were telling me what their new computer could do.

And I felt a bit bad about Logan and Harry, but while Enki had a relatively good relationship with Burgmeister, it was not good enough to provide them with a super-Grendel.

I mean, Vandermeer obviously had a special status in that regard.

Mostly, we were just chatting. Talking about our days, our hobbies and so on. Gordon and Owen were arguing about some sort of tabletop strategy game or something like that. And were making my eyes glassing over when they tried to explain about that universe. Yes, I get it, compared to this fictional universe, we did not have it too bad here.

But it did not seem that they understood the difference between a fictional crapsack world and the real world.

Yeah, the hellhole they were describing was even worse than the world we were living in, as hard to believe as that sounds but it was still not real.

Sure, they had their fun collecting their little figurines, painting them, and then organizing some sort of battles with others… but please, the rest of us were not such inclined and we did not need another hour of background material.

Fortunately, the rest had some more… rational hobbies. Rose was a hobby artist. Painting, a bit of sculpting. Nothing unusual, but it let her relax.

Tamara was writing a couple of webnovels, and relaxed by playing computer games.

Nadia had a couple of dogs and was into what she called extreme sports. If it is fun for her, who cares? As long as she leaves me alone with it.

Tim was losing himself in his music. We would have to talk about that later for a bit. His instruments were the guitar as well as the bass guitar.

Danielle was a member of the SCA and enjoyed running around in medieval garb and playing the peasant. Well, each of their own. The kicker was that she enjoyed making the clothes for that by hand.

Kelsey was more of a couch potato. Her hobbies were old movies and TV series, as well as computer games.

Logan was collecting old memes, as well as puns, jokes, and all in all a hobby historian.

Harrison on the other hand had the hobby of hang gliding. It was astonishing that Burgmeister let him do it, but they did.

When I described my hobbies, well mostly Nibbles, reading, and music, Tim got a bit excited. Until I told him how many instruments I was learning. Then he became somewhat drawn back.

Now Jason did refuse to talk about his hobbies. That triggered a round of teasing speculation about what his hobbies might be. But he did not buck and reveal what he liked to do.

At the end of the meeting, I asked Jason, Gordon, Tamara, and Kelsey to wait for a bit, while I fired off an invite to Nate.

I was, naturally, presenting my findings to them. And equally naturally, Jason had to complain.

“What now? Don’t you think that we have other things to do other than jumping to your wims?”

I sighed and managed to not roll my eyes. Then as calmly as I was able to, I answered him:

“I think it is something that you need to know. But who am I? It is your decision. Do whatever you want, and let the others tell you about it some other time.”

Kelsey frowned.

“Not that I like to agree with Jase, but… I at least have other things planned. Is it really important?”

I unwillingly snorted.

“I have expected that from Jason, but from you? Well, at least you were just honestly asking instead of whining. But yes, I think it is important. For you even more than for Jason and Gordon, while I think it only tangentially pertains to Tams.”

Gordon frowned but shrugged.

“So… what is it?”

I took the opportunity to change the viron to my lab in Colorado, just in time for Nate to arrive.

I turned to Gordon.

“Wait a couple of minutes, and let me show you first.” Then I turned my attention to Nate.

“Hello. I want to show you something.”

Nate smiled and answered:

“I am always happy to meet with you, but what are the others doing here? And what is this?”

“This…” I gestured to the lab, “is Cheyenne Mountain.”

That made his eyes narrow, and he looked at the setup.

“Is that… a mercury target?” He looked at me and raised an eyebrow, and proved that while the K4 had higher native intelligence, he was in some ways smarter than them.

“A spallation source? Does that mean you already have a solution?”

I just smiled.

“Let me show you. Warden, start the baseline test again.”

The colorful avatar appeared beside me and said: “Of course.”

Only for the whiteboards to make their reappearance.

While the proton lance started up, I explained.

“This is a proton beam, firing on a mercury target. Creating high-energy neutrons. You see the energy output of the beam as the blue line. Behind the target, we have standard EM harvesters as they are used in fusactors. The energy they are harvesting is the green line.

Finally behind that are radiation detectors. The red line is theirs.”

Then the test began, with the same 150W of the proton lance, 7.6W in harvested energy, and 119.34W in radiation.

Jason snorted and snarked:

“So you can create neutrons. Woho! Humanity has done that for 200 years. And this was what you wanted to show us? Interrupt our weekend for?”

This time I did roll my eyes.

“This was the baseline test, without the new device I have developed. The harvested energy is just the passive emission of all the tech in the room right now, and the radiation is virtually all of the neutrons.

Now the second test. Warden, go to 1%, please.”

“Affirmative.”

The result was within 1% of the last time. Variances in the environment most likely.

Nate jumped up and down and clapped.

“I knew it! I knew you could do it!”

Gordon frowned.

“Is that real? I mean, we are in cyberspace, so, is that a simulation or the real deal?”

“This is real. As real as it gets.”

Kelsey looked at the graphs a bit confused.

“Uh… that is nice and interesting and such, and I am sure you physics nerds find that really important, but what are Tams and I doing here?”

Nate chuckled.

“You two are here because you Kelsey, will have a ball of a time designing whole lineups of new fusactors for the forseeable future. And Tamara is here because it will most likely impact electrical engineering as well.”

Gordon looked at the results and tilted his head.

“But… it is not yet done. There is still radiation coming through. We need to get that down to zero, or close to it.”

Stolen novel; please report.

Jason scoffed.

“You believe her? Get real, she is a computer ‘scientist’. This is almost certainly just a simulation.”

I chose to ignore Jason, and instead to answer Gordon.

“This was only at 1% of the device power. Warden, what was the optimum strength for the 150W proton beam?”

“The optimal power setting is 2.03% of 187kHz with a 33.4% pulse wave.”

I nodded.

“Then do that, please.”

“Affirmative.”

The result was 367W of harvested energy, interestingly, with zero radiation.

I looked at the graph.

“It seems that this provides more harvested energy than 5%. Interesting.”

At closer inspection, the graph for the harvested energy was going on for 1.23 seconds and did not create quite as high a spike.

Then I shook my head and turned back to the group.

“Whatever. The point is that we can now stop the radiation from leaving the fusactors.”

I felt my shoulders grabbed from behind just before Jason whirled me around to face him, and he screamed into my face:

“For fuck’s sake, you seriously want me to believe that you somehow broke physics and magically made neutrons vanish and energy appear out of nowhere? And that this simulation is anything close to a proof? You are just trying to tear me down, humiliate me. I won’t let you do that. I won’t let you pull the wool over everybody’s heads. So you can stop now.”

I was a bit taken aback by his explosion, but a simple repulsor script shoved him a few meters away.

“Of the two of us, the one possessed by the need to prove they are better is you. You are always trying to upstage me.

I on the other hand barely think about you at all. Your imaginary ranking system is irrelevant to me. So you are the top dog in your little personal world? Have fun with it. I don’t care. I am in the real world, figuring out how it works, making it better. Step by step.

You don’t figure into that in any fashion. If you don’t believe me, you are invited to go personally to Cheyenne Mountain and observe the testing with your own eyes. Bring your tools as well.

But keep in mind that it is a tad irradiated. So don’t expect to survive it.”

Then I took a deep breath.

“And no, I did not ‘break physics’, make neutrons vanish, or energy appear out of nowhere. The only thing I did was shattering Sokolov’s so-called proof.”

Gordon had walked to the whiteboard, and with his back to me, asked:

“He is right in one aspect though. Well, two really. The high-energy neutrons have to go somewhere, and the additional energy has to come from somewhere.”

“You are half right. The high-energy neutrons go nowhere. They are still there for the whole time until they decay. They are just no longer high-energy.

What happens is that the interaction between their impulse and the quantum field the new device generates rips open tiny holes in the barrier between this… well the best word for it is I think plane, and what can be best described as hyperspace. A plane with significantly higher base energy.

Until the impulse of the neutron, and with it its energy, is mostly spent, part of that higher base energy rushes through to our universe in the form of high-energy photons. Also known as electromagnetic radiation.

Which the EM harvesters pick up and convert into electrical energy.”

Tamara looked at me a bit confused.

“But… doesn’t that also create the energy?”

Honestly, I was a bit surprised by her question. She should know better. Maybe a brief failure of her thought processes.

So instead of saying something sarcastic, I thought about how to explain it.

“No, not really. Think about it this way. You have a water tank up on a mountain. And a reservoir at the base of the mountain.

The tank at the top has a higher base energy than the reservoir at the base because it is higher. Between those two tanks is a pipe with a valve in it. This valve has some spring pressure to hold it closed.

If you now push onto the valve and open it, water will rush through the pipe into the bottom reservoir. The energy you are using is just the one needed to keep the valve open against the spring pressure, while the energy that a water turbine a bit above the bottom receives is orders of magnitude higher than what you are using.

Now with this tech, the impulse of the neutron is your hand on the valve to overcome the spring pressure, while the energy rushing out of hyperspace is the water going down the pipe.

The energy is neither created nor destroyed, just moved. The neutrons are not destroyed, just slowed down to a near standstill.

Which makes them harmless.”

“Oh, ok. But why is this so important?”

I could not help but chuckle.

“You do not know much about fusactors, right?”

“Uh, yeah. I always found them a bit… boring.”

“If I remember it correctly, an Excelsior 2800 has 64 grav coils with each having 270 Keppler ± 50 Keppler. Is that correct?”

Kelsey nodded and murmured.

“Yeah, that is correct.”

“Thank you. Each of those coils costs around Ȼ5 million. Making it so that just the grav coils of it cost as much as Ȼ320 million. With the pumps, the control systems, the shielding, and everything else, it costs Vandermeer around Ȼ360 million to build one of them.

You sell it for Ȼ450 million.

Now… Warden, what would a fusactor with the new tech with the same size and redundancy as the Excelsior 2800 cost?”

“One moment please… calculating optimal configuration.”

A couple of seconds later, Warden continued:

“For the grav coils, the optimal configuration would be to use 64 1273 Keppler coils. Each costing Ȼ72.34. All in all Ȼ4629.76 for all of them.

The fuel pumps are cheaper than a grav conveyor, but approximately 68.17 times more likely to fail. If you replace the 12 pumps with the same number of conveyors, you would pay Ȼ288.17 per conveyor instead of Ȼ122.48 per pump. Or Ȼ3458.04 versus Ȼ1469.76. Thanks to the higher reliability, you could reduce it to four though, and still increase reliability. That would cost you Ȼ1152.68.

For the control system, you should replace the old Tesseract-based system with a Chronos-based one. Instead of Ȼ12.37 million for the computers, you would now get the same computing power, and twice the redundancy, for Ȼ1.77 million, and you should replace the data lines with Q-links, making it at once easier to maintain, and cheaper. Instead of Ȼ6.3 million in optical fibers, you know use Ȼ3798.25 in Q-links.

The shielding stays the same with Ȼ19,33 million.

That makes the manufacturing cost of the current Excelsior 2800 Ȼ358,216,000 ± Ȼ50,000.

The new fusactor of the same size would cost you Ȼ21.11 million to build.”

“Right now, Vandermeer makes a profit of around Ȼ90 million per 2800. That is a margin of 20%.

If you keep the profit the same, the margin would become 81%.

At the same time, the fusactor would cost the customer Ȼ111 million. Or less than a quarter compared to the old 2800.

Not that this thing would be a 2800. Instead of 2.8 Terrawatt, what would be the power of this design?”

Warden answered in her permanent singing voice:

“Under optimal conditions, it will produce 52.5 Terrawatt of electricity. Optimal conditions are unlikely. At current marketing practices, Vandermeer would most likely sell this device as a 50 Terrawatt fusactor.”

Gordon stood there, slackjawed, while Tamara only said “Fuuck!”. Kelsey was wide-eyed, Nate looked like the cat that had eaten the canary, and Jason… well Jason did not look very happy, and he snarled:

“So you now magically create 18 times the power out of the same amount of fuel, huh?”

He turned to Nate.

“Do you seriously believe that bullshit?”

Only for Warden to answer him.

“You are mistaken. It is not the same amount of fuel. The stronger grav coils, along with the reduced electrostatic repulsion, as well as the stronger feed by the conveyor, not to forget the bigger fusion chamber, lets it use approximately, 4.76 times the fuel compared to the current 2.8 Terrawatt model. It only generates approximately 3.75 times the energy per unit of fuel.”

Nate shook his head and then chuckled dryly.

“Now we only need for you to find a way to reduce the cost of the shielding. It is telling that it is now the most expensive part of the whole fusactor.”

Warden turned to him.

“The amount of shielding is excessive in relation to what you need. Considering that your lesser fusactor lines have less shielding, as well as generally less redundancy, I assumed that you want to keep the shielding the same.”

Nate nodded.

“You are right. This excessive redundancy is the hallmark of the Excelsior line. Even so, selling a 50 Terrawatt Excelsior for around a quarter of the cost of a 2.8 Terrawatt one should give us some leg up.

Vivian, Vandermeer will buy the exclusive rights for this… new tech, whatever you end up calling it, for two years.”

I raised my hands in a defensive gesture.

“Talk with Michael about that. I only invent the stuff. He is the one doing the selling.”

After that, they all vanished, though I remained behind, watching them dematerialize, before I sighed.

“Jason will become a problem. He is so… fixated on besting me that sooner or later he will cross some lines better uncrossed.”

“I agree. I will keep him observed.”

I nodded at that.

“I hate it, but I don’t see another option.”

Then I turned my attention back to the experiment.

“Are we ready for the next test?”

“I assume you are asking about the test without the mercury target?”

“Correct. We have to know how it turns out.”

“I only need to remove the target. One moment please.”

In the lab, a Brokr grabbed the mercury target and wheeled it to the side, while some Eitri moved the radiation detectors out of the way as well, before Warden spoke again:

“The test is ready.”

I nodded.

“Do it!”

Again, the proton lance fired. This test also required for a 150W one-second pulse, with the neutron trap still at 2%. The incandescent beam emerged from the lance, and became visibly weaker, before impacting the back wall as a barely visible line of light. There was no visible damage from it.

“I was right. It works with the proton lance as well. How much energy did we generate?”

“An average of 348W.”

“A bit less than with the neutrons? Interesting.”

“But the beam was not fully converted.”

“Indeed. Do we have an estimate of how much of the power impacted the wall?”

“No, unfortunately not.”

It took me a moment to consider the situation. The answer to why more of the neutron’s energy was converted was quite easy though.

“The neutrons move at a bit less than 5% the speed of light. The protons move at 98%. It is highly probable that the protons leave the area of the effect before they are completely bled of their energy.”

I looked around.

“Can we fix another harvester array on the wall, please?”

“At once.”

Fortunately, quite a few harvester arrays were lying around as a result of the ramped-up tests, and the bots only needed a few minutes to attach one of them to the wall.

The next test showed that of the 150W the proton lance emitted, 64.43W hit the wall, or a bit less than half.

Over the next hour, we slowly increased the power of the lance, and the neutron trap, until we hit 100% on the trap, and 118 MW on the lance. No part of the lance hit the wall, and the harvesters gained 556.4 MW.

I had, in some way gained unlimited power. After subtracting the power for the lance, the trap, and the inefficiencies of the whole design, it still gave a net gain of 303 MW.

A quick calculation showed that to get all out of the 3.8 GW of the proton lance, we needed nearly 40 times the amount of the trap.

It would net gain us 9.5 GW. Unfortunately, that sounded more valuable than it was.

Sure, it was power essentially for free. The catch though was that this device would be more than five times the size of a standard 15 GW fusactor. The cheapest kind.

Yes, the resulting energy was free, but the cost of hydrogen was negligible. In the end, it was way more economical to have the fusactor and three times its volume as hydrogen storage than to use this contraption.

It might be interesting for large, isolated installations where space was of no concern, but resupply was.

Those kinds of installations were pretty rare though. And it did not escape my notice that selling this technology under that premises would render our proton lances essentially useless.

Instead of damaging the enemy, we would power him. Not a good trade in my opinion.

“Encrypt the results of this test and don’t inform anybody about it. For now, we keep it secret.”

“As you wish.”

Well, that was half of that Saturday over. But my work here was done. Enki had another interesting product, and I had finally managed to get the fusactor problem sorted.

Satisfied with my day, I surfaced and moved to the mess hall to make myself a snack. It should not come to pass though.

As soon as I was through the door, my vision was drawn to the giant figure standing stooped over in the middle of the room.

A giant man, standing in armor right there, in my home. I… honestly I could no longer think. Rationally or irrationally. I just reacted, when my phobia acted up, and panic set in.

I moved blindly backward, only to stumble over something and fall. Trying to crawl away was no good, and finally, I could do nothing more than roll together and whimper.