Getting a Technology System in Modern Day - Chapter 572

Chapter 572: Monsters, Inc.

Chapter 572: Monsters, Inc.

€œJust can€™t catch a fucking break,€ a man sighed, looking at the sky.

His sentiments were shared by almost everyone on Earth; Minister Rogers€™ staff had released news of the incoming celestial catastrophe mere minutes before.

The current populace of Earth, both imperial citizens and noncitizens alike, were becoming numb to world-ending situations.

The emergency broadcast notification sound had been heard so often that most people considered it no more important than the beeping of an alarm clock that woke them for work in the morning.

That was partly due to the frequency with which it sounded, but the greater reason for peoples€™ eerie calm was that the empire would either have long been prepared for the emergencies, or there would be time for them to prepare a solution.

Thus, they took the announcements in stride, confident that the empire would solve all of their problems before they became problems at all.

……

As everything urgent had been dealt with, Aron had returned to his lab.

He was sitting at his desk with Nova, as always, accompanying him.

Despite her presence, the only sound in the lab was the tapping of Aron€™s finger on his desk.

It was a tic he had developed and would only happen when he was deeply lost in thought.

Normally, when he was thinking deeply enough for his finger tapping to commence, he would spend at least half an hour lost in his own mind.

And when he finished whatever he was thinking of, it indicated that there would soon be a groundbreaking development in research or political machinations.

Aron spent an hour in his deep contemplation, then finally awoke from his fugue state.

€œWow,€ he uttered under his breath.

{You seem excited, sir.

Were your most recent purchases enough to help you finalize Project Protagonist?} Nova asked.

He nodded.

€œMhm…

it€™s good enough for what I€™m currently trying to build, yeah.

But that€™s not why I€™m excited….

You have no idea what other things we can use those technologies for,€ he said with all the excitement of a kid on Christmas morning, staring at brightly wrapped presents beneath a Christmas tree.

{What do you have in mind, sir?} she asked, fully prepared to begin delegating research tasks to the people in Lab City.

€œRemember the genetic enhancements provided to our citizens, and the higher tiers of enhancements given to imperial employees and ARES?€
{Yes, I recall.

Our current genetic tech is something our researchers are still inordinately proud of, having discovered it on their own without you providing the base technology,} Nova replied.

€œYes, that.

With biological computing, our genetic enhancements can be cranked up to elev…

no, twelve.

It€™ll take some time, but once the researchers iterate on the base technology to the point where it becomes wholly ours, we can do some truly amazing things with it.€
{Like what, sir?}
€œWith biological computing alone, we can create biological robots, or so-called €˜monsters€™.

Think about it for a minute….

ARES soldiers riding dragons into battle alongside Jormungandr wyrms carrying legions right into the heart of the enemy.

Or we can tailor them to be mission specific, like enormous whales that act as underwater resupply stations for people riding sharks with lasers….€ Aron cleared his throat, realizing he was getting further and further off topic.

€œBut the best thing of all is that they€™ll all be disposable and we can print them in job lots….€
That was just the start of what Aron had been cooking up in his mind.

He was thinking of all the €œmonsters€ from humanity€™s history and collective mythology, like dragons, phoenixes, Japanese youkai, and so on.

It could even be scaled up to creating enormous astral beasts that were capable of not only surviving, but thriving in the harsh conditions of deep space.

It was just a beginning, and the idea would require centuries before coming to fruition.

But thanks to the universal simulation and Lab City, time was something he had in abundance.

Especially if his plan to combine the three computing branches into a single hybrid computer technology that took the advantages of each system and used those to counter the disadvantages of the others came to fruition.

The longer he spoke, the more excited he became.

He couldn€™t help but consider all the ways he would use his new toys when the day dawned that his ideas matured.

€œAs for runic computing, I can use that as a means of creating valuable materials that€™ll push our materials science up to a whole new level, too.

Things that simply don€™t exist in significant amounts will be simple to create by combining runic computers and our already existing atomic printers.€
When he€™d woken up and delved into the knowledge of runic computers in his mind, Aron had been reminded of the alloy that Professor Brechet had discovered a while back and its implications in the condensation and storage of mana.

Upon further research, Aron had discovered that the more mana is absorbed by a material, the more changes it underwent until it became so fundamentally different that it couldn€™t be considered the same material anymore.

The situation was the same as when he had purchased the quantum computing technology.

What the system provided him was the finalized, completely mature technology after countless experiments and iterations on the idea.

It was both good and bad; good insofar as it saved him and the Lab City researchers time in not having to repeat the failures, but bad for the same reason.

It made iterating on the resulting knowledge thousands of times more difficult, since failure is often a path that guides future successes, and even the most useless of failures could often be used as inspiration when facing problems in the future.

In the case of runic computing, it included the materials required to build the computers themselves, as well as the methods of manufacturing those materials.

And with his atomic printers, he was uniquely capable of manufacturing even the rarest of mana-infused material.

The civilization that had pioneered runic computing could only rely on rare substances that had been fostered in mana-rich environments over decades, centuries, or even millennia.

Although they could artificially produce some of them, they were at best inferior copies and it required an enormous investment in mana stones to convert each component.

And when you added in their lacking manufacturing technology, runic computers were rare and expensive.

After all, the civilization that invented the computers during their time as a tier 1 civilization still hadn€™t left the era of boutique production and the barter economy.

But humanity in general, and especially Aron, had already solved those problems.