Corebound Chapter 3-32 (Patreon)

There was a wet plop as Jacob dumped his latest failed experiment into the incinerator. He closed the door and activated the device, which pumped plasma through the interior to destroy anything within.

Jacob thought the device was overkill, but he could understand why the scientists in the secret underground facility designed to experiment on alien tech might require such a thing.

He had been getting regular updates from Barry about the happenings in Astryx space. Things had taken a turn there, and the alien coalition was now stuck in a furious debate about the use of nanite weapons.

That worked out in their favor, because their projects weren’t going as planned. Jacob had sequenced the basic crystal structure. Calling it DNA would be a stretch. It didn’t use the same nitrogenous bases as most life. Yeah, even most alien life still relied on good old A, T, C, G bases.

The crystal was truly alien. Jacob was beginning to suspect it might have origins outside of the Milky Way, or even this universe. Despite the material’s weirdness, it still had base pairs. Six of them, in fact, which at least gave him a starting point.

A starting point was all he had, because unlike DNA pairs, the crystal base formed a triple helix, making it far more complex than human DNA. The only upside there was that the crystal’s DNA was rather short, so there were only so many permutations it could exist in. A few trillion instead of the ridiculous number of possibilities for the entire human genome.

The sequencing was running, but even with most of his processing power geared toward the task, it was a slog. Thankfully, Jacob only needed to find a few key triggers in the genome. Mainly, how to make the crystals grow smaller.

He had found a few already, but his latest failure proved that changing anything about the crystal wasn’t going to be easy.

Junior was having a better time of things. He had finally rolled out the optimal folding technique for the crystal to shrink it down into the smallest form possible. The issue was growing the crystal in that configuration.

Heat buildup in the dense ball of material was so intense it actually caused the DNA of the crystal to break down. Wrapping it around a “thermally stabilizing core” actually worked. Now Jacob had an excuse for the hollow feature within the core where he was going to hide the tiny void bombs if the High Chancellor asked.

The best part was that the core would actually be shunting heat through phasing, since there was no other way to remove heat from the finished product without a whole lot of thermal management that would otherwise make it too large to fit.

Jacob put down his failed experiment to let the sequencing run some more. He turned his attention to the fighter project, jumping into a drone at one of the fabrication centers.

He stepped aside as a maintenance drone zipped past and made his way to the foreman. The facility was one of the ones run by the WA.

A frazzled man looked up from a stack of papers as Jacob entered his office.

“I told you, I don’t have any new updates.”

“I don’t believe we’ve spoken,” Jacob said.

“Who are you?” The man asked tiredly.

“Jacob.”

“Ah. Yeah, I thought you were someone else. God, it’s weird that multiple people can just hop into that machine and bother me. What do you want?”

“I was told there were production issues, and I’ve come to see if I can help with those.”

“Not unless you can find me more trained workers. It’s less an issue of production, and more an issue of keeping up with production.”

Jacob was confused. “You should have plenty of maintenance drones to assist.” He had built a lot of spares recently.

“I would love to use them, but the workers decided to form a union. We could do without most of them, but there are some key people we cannot afford to lose, so we are stuck with what we have.”

Jacob frowned. “I didn’t think the WA went in for unions.”

“They don’t, but when groups of people realize you can’t do without them, there is little to stop them from forming one, short of arresting everyone. When this is all said and done, they will likely be shitcanned, but until then.” He shrugged.

Jacob pinched the bridge of his nose in his virtual space. He didn’t begrudge workers their rights, but come on, they could have picked a better time. And it wasn’t like they weren’t getting paid. They were making loads of wallies, which is what the WA had dubbed their currency.

He suspected the problem originated from the WA’s own caste laws. That wasn’t his problem to fix, but maybe he could do something about the union.

“Can I see the union’s agreement?”

The foreman grunted before pulling open a squeaky drawer on the cheap particle board desk. He tossed a thick paper packet on the top of the desk. “All yours.”

Jacob copied the document into a digital format and returned the original back to the foreman, before leaving the building to study it further.

It annoyed him that he had to dedicate processing power to sifting through the document, but it took only a few minutes to get the gist of what it entailed.

Whoever had written it had been thorough. The document covered merged individuals and aliens, ensuring they couldn’t be used to replace human workers. Then he got to the portion that showed who the union rep was.

Jacob didn’t recognize the name, but he did recognize the name of the lawyer next to it. He sighed in annoyance and popped over to a drone at the WA’s headquarters.

He didn’t bother knocking on Sebastian’s door; he just let himself in. “Why are you trying to sabotage humanity?”

The man didn’t even look surprised to see him as he glanced up from a document.

“I have nothing to say to you. Get out.” He waved dismissively.

“Is that so?”

 Jacob stomped into the room.

“What are you doing?” Sebastian demanded as Jacob grabbed him by the front of his shirt and yanked him across the desk.

“I’m taking you to Mrs. Shank so we can have a discussion. I’m sure she’d be delighted to know you’ve been sandbagging our projects.”

Jacob dragged the uncooperative man out the door and down the hall, where he screamed for help, and guards the entire time.

More than one person opened their door to see what was going on, but they took one look at Jacob and went back to their work.

Jacob made it up another floor with the kicking, screaming, and biting man before guards stopped him.

“Sir, please put the representative down.”

“I’m taking Sebastian here to have a chat with Mrs. Shank. You can either get out of the way, or I’ll use him as a shield to make you.”

The guards shared uneasy looks between themselves before stepping aside. “We’ll lead you there, and ensure the representative remains unharmed,” one of the guards added.

Seeing that he wasn’t being freed by his people only made Sebastian even more vocal. Jacob considered stuffing something in the man’s mouth, or even breaking his jaw to shut him up, but he just tuned his audio receptors to filter out the man’s whining.

The guards led them to a small conference room, where Shank and Finly were already waiting. Someone must have alerted them to what was going on. Jacob thrust Sebastian toward the table, where he stumbled until his hands landed on the top. Then he shut the door behind him.

“Sit down, Sebastian,” Shank said, sounding both tired and annoyed.

Sebastian straightened, then fixed his crumpled outfit and tie before taking a seat.

Once he was seated, Shank turned toward him. “You better have a good excuse for accosting one of the WA leaders, Jacob.”

“Are you aware that Sebastian has been helping workers set up unions, and because of that, your mega factory is only outputting a single ship every week instead of the five it’s capable of?”

Sebastian didn’t look at all ashamed of his actions, but it was Shank’s response that really shocked Jacob.

“Yes. I requested him to do that.”

“What? Why would you do that?”

“Jacob, you are good with computers and all the automated systems. The three of us are good with humans. We’ve all run or had a large part in successful companies. It was clear early on in your ship production that workers were displeased. We don’t have nearly enough workforce to run the facility twenty-four seven. So we cut shifts, but workers started not showing up. We could have kicked those workers back down to the lowest caste, but that doesn’t get us anywhere. So instead, I had Sebastian find a worker who was willing to be our man on the inside. We give the employees what they want, which was more protections and benefits, and they put in more work.”

“More work?” Jacob scoffed.

“Yes, because one ship is better than none, and that is what you would have gotten before the union was put in place. We don’t have to like this, Jacob, but there are certain realities we have to adhere to. Part of that is our fault. The WA swept in so quickly after the alien invasion that the local populace didn’t have to face what the rest did across the globe. Because of that, most still have old-world sensibilities when it comes to rights, and that causes a lot of friction.”

Jacob took a moment to calm his anger. “Is this happening across all of your facilities?”

“Not all. At least not yet, but word is spreading, and within a few weeks, they will all likely be demanding unions of their own, or join the already existing one.”

Jacob ran the numbers. That would cut ship production by half.

That wasn’t good, because they weren’t the only facilities having issues. Two more fabrication centers were running into maintenance problems, while a third had issues with material supply. Jacob was forced to swap production over to other facilities while those problems got resolved.

If those automated facilities were in trouble, he could hardly expect human-operated ones to run at full capacity.

He sucked up his pride and apologized to Sebastian for his actions. The man appeared smug about the whole situation, which made Jacob want to punch him in the face all over again.

“Is there any possibility of getting more production capacity out of your facilities?” he asked instead of acting on his desire.

Shank shook her head. “In the short term, no, but we are training new people, which should help.” She glanced at Sebastian before continuing. “Despite what some people in this room might think, we are all in this together, Jacob. If I ever feel like someone in the WA is hurting the future of humanity, I’ll be the first to deal with it.”

The smug smile quickly left Sebastian’s face at those words, and that almost made the entire trip worthwhile. Jacob thanked the group for their time and exited the drone, letting it return to its charging cradle on its own.