Outrun - Chapter 383 (Patreon)

“So… are we going to talk about it?” Mira swirled a can of XtraEnergy Quantum around. The liquid sloshed around the can noisily.

All four of us were gathered around a booth in the back corner of my speakeasy. A soft chandelier lit up the treated surface of the table with a soft glow, and gentle neon reflected form around the walls. If nothing else, Squeaky Clean was improving my mood slightly. 

I didn’t look up. “Do we… have to?”

My plan fell apart. It was obvious what the issues were—I just didn’t prep enough. I was trying that thing Mira always insisted I do, and it backfired. Flying by the seat of my pants just didn’t work. I should’ve spent another two weeks making plans before initiating the hit on Mickey. 

Even then, though… that was blaming Mira for my own issues, wasn’t it? There were deeper problems that lurked just below the surface from start to finish. I just… I didn’t really want to point them out quite yet.

“I think it’ll have some merit.” Saint tapped the table idly with his finger. “How are we going to improve if we don’t discuss it?”

”I-I’m with Shiro,” Luna said without even looking up from her deck. Her fingers clacked around endlessly on the thing. “Can we put this off till later.”

“Later?” Mira snorted and set her can down. She crossed her arms with a metallic creak. ”Oh, your bad habits are rubbing off on little Luna.”

“I’m older than you.” Luna finally looked away from her deck with a soft glow to her eyes. She looked like she was this close to ‘pranking’ Mira with a not so friendly quick hack.

”Do it.” The halo atop Mira’s head pulsed with light. “See what happens.”

”Let’s not fight? Please?” Saint sighed and ran a hand through his hair. “Okay, if you don’t want to talk about it, then how about we discuss where we’re going from here?”

”I don’t know.” I sighed and leaned back in my chair. “Look, it was my fault entirely. I’ll take the blame for this one.”

”We don’t have to assign blame, Shiro.” Mira patted my shoulder lightly. “This isn’t a game with clear-cut fault. If we really want to go there, its entirely my fault for failing to hold him down. I’m the bruiser, and I had the simplest job of all of us.”

Luna closed her deck wiht a soft snap. I didn’t think she’d ever look away from it. ”A-and it was my fault for not cutting his chrome’s connection. I also didn’t tell you guys what kind of chrome he had. I should’ve gathered more intel as the runner.” 

“That’s not fair.” I threw my hands up in the air, and a light bolt of electricity discharged up into the chandelier. It flickered for a moment and then resettled. “Sorry. You all thought he was unconscious, which is ultimately my fault.”

“Or its my fault for not pushing you harder when I asked about the drug the first time around.” Saint casually threw himself into the firing line next. “And for not recognizing that the stuff was Suna when you poured mixed it in.”

But Saint wasn’t even supposed to be there if my original plan went through. It, again, was ultimately my fault. I didn’t trust them enough to incorporate them into my larger plan to begin with. What was the point of having a team if I wasn’t going to actually use them for anything?

I flinched and rubbed at the crook of my elbow. After my time at SPS, I had an eerily similar mental conversation with myself. Back then, though, the question had been what was the point of having the interface if I wasn’t smart enough to use them?

Was I being arrogant? I just assumed I could handle it, and if I couldn’t, there was no issue. I could always tug on my Spectral Flock and get away. Or was that just complacency raising its ugly head once more?

”We can sit here all day assigning blame.” Mira picked up her can and sloshed it around. “Or, like Saint said, we can try to make a plan going forward.

“Chek.” I shook my head and tucked a lock of silver behind my ear. “Okay… what do we have to work with? What do we know?”

”Mickey’s dead.” Luna pulled out her deck and flipped it around for us to see the Blue Crusade’s report. They moved quick, and had already swept it under the rug as a tentative suicide, though investigation was still pending.

”That’s…” I stared at the red smear that the man had turned into and my stomach rolled slightly. “Just—can we wait a minute? I’ll be right back.”

I slid out of the booth before anyone could stop me and headed for the bar. It took me a minute to remember exactly where I put it, but I pulled out one of my holopucks. I thought I’d use them up here for some holographic war games or something, but I hadn’t quite gotten around to it yet.

”Use this.” I activated the puck and tossed it onto the table.

“R-right.” Luna popped up the report so we could all see it much more clearly. 

“What are we after this guy for, anyway? He piss one of you guys off?” Mira asked. Unlike the other two, I hadn’t told her much of anything. This was supposed to be a surprise for her at the end of the day.

”Something like that.” I glazed over the topic and motioned to Luna. “Where are his assets going?”

”T-to the city council for the next couple days unless they find an heir.” Luna glanced at Mira and then looked at me. I slowly shook my head. “It’s doubtful though. I looked, a-and I couldn’t find one.”

“Can we pose as a distant cousin?” Saint asked. “He must’ve had hundreds of millions in assets, right?”

”Chek, but posing as a relative is so much harder than you think.” I looked into it when trying to take over Cold Moon. There was zero chance we’d be able to full the system in this regard. At least, not without an insane amount of legwork. “We’re better off tracking the assets after the council deals with them.”

“Th-that’ll be a couple days.” Luna pulled away from the hologram, and instead replaced it with the shimmering symbol of a half moon. 

“Let me know as soon as something changes.” I slid out of the booth, took the puck back, and slid it into my bag. It wouldn’t hurt to start carrying it around. “In the meantime, let’s try to lay low just in case.”

Mira sighed and slammed down the rest of her energy drink. ”I’ll go back to finding lost cats.”

“Is it really that bad?” Saint asked. “I’ve been meaning to write some articles about what its like to be a Troubleshooter. Mind if I tag along?”

“I’d appreciate the company. It’s so boring at the moment.” Mira slid out of the booth next to me. “You’ll be fine, Shiro?”

”Chek… I’ve got a mountian of work left, anyway.” I nodded to the back of the speakeasy. “You guys are welcome by anytime.”

”Maybe once you actually get this place up and running.” Saint stood up and looked around. “It’s nice, but no drinks is a bit…”

”I’ll work on that.” No idea where I’d find a chef and bartender yet. The alcohol license was also up in the air, as was where I’d source the stuff. Once I got the building, I’d have to figure out all of that.

I left the three of them behind and descended into my workshop. As for work—well, I wasn’t exactly lying. I headed over to my foundry and got to work on Mira’s power armor. It was almost done, and just needed some final touches. While I worked on that, my mind drifted to some other issues I’d noticed recently.

Notably, I lacked a consistent source of heavy fire power. Aside form my pistol, I danced around a dozen different rifles whenever I was needed them. Everything came from Aether Imbuement, and I’d yet to actually make something more powerful.

The biggest issue, of course, was weight and size. Except—I already had solutions to both, didn’t I? Weight could be taken care of with a microscopic array of Gravitic chambers. Size would be way more complicated, but something I could manage now that I had the industrial foundry up and running.

Since I had some money and time to work with, this was the next step that I’d been planning ever since I set my eyes on the foundry. I’d need a massive production facility to even get started on Quantum Automation’s intricacies… or several Foundries up and running.

I finished up the power armor,  transmuted a bunch of materials, and dumped them into my Foundry. Then, I set the beast of the machine to start making the parts to quickly assemble a second Foundry. My workshop had a lot of empty space, and it was time I started to fix that. Not to mention more production lines would accelerate my Roughrider output.

With that taken care of, I sat back in my chair with my notebook and got to work on actually designing everything I’d need to get started. More specifically, the parts and machinery I’d need to kick my quantum dreams into gear.

Nanites and nano-machines were still just out of my reach unless I wanted to sink the next couple months purely into getting those up and ready. There was a workaround though. It was what gave Quantum Automation its name—Quantum Folding.

I didn’t actually understand how it all worked in theory. In practice, though, the idea was to fold several particles into one space. Then, when ready to use them, they’d unfold. Basically, I could fold all the particles of a giant flatscreen TV into a pen. Then, when I was ready to use the TV, I could activate the device and it’d shift back into a TV.

It went really deep into quantum engineering. It made my brain hurt, so I tried not to think about it all that much. It had a lot to do with entangling and interlinking objects on a quantum scale, and then abusing the superposition mechanics of quantum engineering. Basically, the machines I wanted to build would displace particles into a sub-space, and then pull them back out when I wanted to. The pen wouldn’t actually store all the particles, but it’d act like the anchor point.

I likely wouldn’t be able to get down to a pen size. Even if I folded everything properly, ejecting all the particles back into the right position with just a press of a button wasn’t something I could just do with my current Tech. I could fold a large rifle into a rubix-cube sized box to hang from my hip, though. 

Of course, that’d all take a lot of energy to do. In the field, I couldn’t have a nuclear reactor strapped to my back… but I could have something better in a quantum battery.

All of that was a pipe dream without getting the prerequisite machines made in the first place. I thought back to my training with Quantum Automation, and Eidetic Schematic did the rest. The exact blueprints and parts I needed flowed to the forefront of my mind, and I got to work sketching everything out. The prints were so insanely complicated they made most of Sentinel’s stuff look like a child’s chicken scratch.

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AN: This one was a real struggle today. I kinda miss fantasy stuff. It’s so much nicer to say spatial magic and back of holding then it is to try to make a plausible excuse for Shiro to have a lot of stuff on her using concepts I don’t even understand. If it sounded plausible enough, though, than I can rest easy.