A month later, Otty and I were standing in a room full of broken apart machines and scrap parts. In the center of the room stood a half-done body of a hover bike. My new project.
"This thing gonna be wild, dude." I said taking a heavy bite from a burger. Otty was slowly munching on his burger on the workbench, while pointing one of his antennas at me, as if showing me that he was listening.
"I'm gonna paint its body black with green fires all over the place, when we repair the chemical compounder. This will be a dream bike, man." I said, taking another big bite, chewing a few times and washing it down with Galax-Cola. Otty didn't like cola, or any other soda at all. Oolong tea, though, went well for him. Strange fella. Washing the burger down with tea? Is there any weirder thing to do?
At this moment you all may say hold on dude, what the hell? You skipped so much? What about your struggle with the feeder?
To tell you the truth I don't want to even mention it. I want to erase that dark part of my life from memory, and sure as hell don't want it anywhere in historical records.
But in short, yeah, I did get to it. It was built solid like a brick shithouse and entirely a Solid State tech, so repairing it was no problem.
I did explain about Solid State tech before, right? At least I think I mentioned it when I explained all these shiny light emitting things on my clothes, that generate power when I inject 4GM particles into them.
Well, our civilization is barely at the stage of developing that tech and still struggling to transition from old technology with spinning and moving parts. The problem with the SS is that particle work cost is actually higher in it than in the old spinners, as I explained. At least on the current level of this technology. But everyone believes that in the future it may be as cost-effective as old tech, or maybe even more economic. We just haven't figured out a way to do it. If we ever will…
At least I may not see that time with the speed technology develops today. Something to do with a deplorable state of science and education in our civilization. As I mentioned, science tends to degrade when the galactic community divides into tens of thousands of small groups and starts carpet bombing each other's solar systems with nukes.
Anyway, the reason everyone feels very hopeful toward Solid State technology is because it's much more compact in size.
However, I failed to mention another advantage of the SS. It revolutionized the manufacturing and production industry. Machines built with SolidState technology are incredibly easy, compact and durable.
As its name suggests, it looks like a solid block of material; however, that block can be configured into absolutely anything. It can be a valve, it can be a motor, it can be a wire or any electronic and automatic component. These blocks may be united into bigger devices. Then by stacking these blocks, that anyone can configure anyway he needs, you can build any machine you need.
From the side it looks like a simple wall built of blocks, but inside it are electronics schemes, signal and power wiring, piping and all kinds of transmitters and actuators. All components of machinery you can imagine riddle this solid-looking wall, turning its insides into an anthill-like maze.
No need to buy motors, motion drivers, inverters, controllers, or any other electronics. All you need is a forge. A device that creates blocks of SS in any design, form or size you need.
The cool perk is that when something is broken in that wall of components, you can reconfigure other blocks, use some undamaged space in the wall to reroute the signals or power and make the machine work again, without the need to forge new parts.
All you need is a special repair device that can make these adjustments in the blocks such as the spherical maintenance unit that I managed to find.
Yeah. As you may have guessed, while our civilization is merely discovering this technology, the Demonic race was functioning on it entirely. Which is why last time I mentioned that we may have actually stolen this technology from them, rather than developed it ourselves. After all, there were lots of captured examples of their tech in the war.
It's quite logical, considering the fact that our horns were made based on solid state technology from the get-go. Even centuries ago, when we used spinner tech all over the place, horns used SS. Isn't this strange?
My guess is we had forgers stolen from the Demonic race in the times of the pre-4GM era. Then used them to steal the basics of 4GM tech. But before we got to implement the SS all over the place, war ended, and we sent our civilization's science back in time. Only now catching up on what we knew back then. Meanwhile, those who started the galactic war, used forgers of old time to produce horns and spread them around. Solidifying the 4GM technology's place in our world.
Which would also mean some people had SS tech the whole time, but held back its implementation just to suck out more juice from people.
I know it sounds like a conspiracy theory.
But, at least if it was me, I would not sell to people the alien technology generations ahead of their time. Instead, I'd gradually sell more and more advanced things for centuries, making a fortune while dominating the markets. At the same time I'd secretly research it and develop it further on my own, so that I would keep being ahead of everyone even when civilization reached the level of technology I initially had. Eventually the world would catch up, but by then I'd be filthy rich and rule the world.
Or something like that. I think I rambled again. Damn.
Where was I?
Ah yes, the feeder. All I needed was to analyze it with a maintenance unit, isolate the corrupted blocks and reroute the broken inner power circuits. Find a few blocks to change the busted ones, and then crack open one of the wasted maintenance units to use it as a control block, because the feeder's control didn't make it through time, similar to the control panel in the room below it.
The next problem was the base chemicals from which to make the food. Feeder, apparently, used lots of chemicals and had a line through which the chemicals were fed into it from somewhere else. But it wasn't working. Best choice was to load it full of bio components on our own.
And that's when Otty shocked me. Which is actually the sole reason I even decided to mention this part of the story at all.
When I mentioned to Otty that we need base bio materials, he once again created a new sprout and pointed it in some direction, making me freeze for a few seconds in shock.
It's not like this cosmic-snot-like pal of mine could understand me at all, right? Not to mention actually knowing where to find what we needed. But I figured that his guess would be no worse than mine. So, I shrugged my shoulders and went to see where he would lead me to.
I followed his direction, walking almost half a town's distance, but at the end of his direction we found a huge warehouse full of containers, among which were well-sealed rustproof boxes with base chemical compounds for feeders and food printers. Otty actually pointed out the right containers where we found them. How could he know all that is beyond me.
With chemicals and a working feeder, all that was left was the program.
I sent Keith the scheme of my new upgraded version of a feeder… and that's when Keith shattered all my hopes for a good nice burger. The feeder did not have functionality to make even a solid thing, not to mention recreate something as sophisticated as taste and smell. The machine was made to produce nutritious feed.
It was a pure mechanical limitation. No software he could write would solve it. There were simply no blocks with these functions in that machine and to install them I needed forger. Which I didn't at the time. And reconfiguring the blocks was no use. The machine was made as it was made. No matter how good an engineer Keith is, he can't make candy out of shit.
I think that according to the demon's logic there was no point in making it complex, when it was intended to only produce the goo-like nutritious paste, for my pal Otty here. They only needed to make it work for years without the need of maintenance. So they built it durable but non-flexible as SS tech may be. Which is probably why this machine actually survived in such good condition after all these years.
This was a machine with single use of turning base chemicals into disgusting looking and even worse tasting, squash-like in consistency, shitty-smelling, vomit-inducing paste. Did I mention disgusting? I'll say it twice then.
Imagine eating vomit that smells like rotten fermented fish. Something so bad you wouldn't give it to swines.
And yes, I ate it. Had you been starving for a week, I'd look at you frowning at it. For a whole week, this was the sole source of nutrients for Otty and me. We did some tweaks in the program, and after many tries made it better tasting, but without a taste configuration block nothing sufficiently could be changed. It still stayed a disgusting paste, but at least I stopped vomiting after tasting it.
Otty did not show any disgust from eating the worst variations though. He ate with the same delight anything this vomit machine produced. So, I thought his taste buds were just this bad. But when we found the real food producer and I treated him to the best burger there is, he was so happy he shook for hours from excitement. And that made me realize, it wasn't his taste buds, he was just used to eating that vomit like squish. Probably forced to eat it most of his life. Damn. Makes me want to kill the demonic bastard all over again. Too bad they are extinct already.
Anyway after trying that disgusting paste, I decided to move on with exploration of this ancient tomb in hope of finding something better. Thus, after several more days of roaming, we've found this experimental laboratory block.
The happiest thing was that it had a living block with kitchen, warehouse full of basic chemicals for food printer and food printer for NORMAL food, which I repaired first thing.
The second happy find was this forger. With this we now can not only repair things for real, but start building something from scratch.
And I decided to build a bike. Always dreamed of having one, but spent my life living either in space stations or spaceships with no space to ride something like that for real. But this place? It's a fucking heaven for a hover bike ride. I am doing it. Period. No matter what you all think about the idea, I am building myself a hover bike.