Chapter Forty-Three – Buying the Gate to Nowhere

Chapter Forty-Three – Buying the Gate to Nowhere

“Strange earth movement? Nah man, you don’t gotta worry. Yellowstone won’t blow.”

–Yellowstone Park Ranger, 2024

***

New Point Total: 21,124

I sucked in a breath as I saw that number. It was… lower than I’d like it to be. I mean, I still had a fuckload of points, I couldn’t complain, but a big part of me really hated spending money and points or whatever. It felt wrong to spend anything like that on stuff that wasn’t immediately necessary.

… Fuck, I really wasn’t a good capitalist, was I? I was sure there were like, therapies or something offered to help people become more used to spending what they had. Not that I really cared to go through that kind of shit.

“Careful. Careful, dammit,” Major Tinwhistle snapped.

The thing I’d bought was being winched up by a crane that looked like it was three sizes bigger than what was necessary. It was the portal component of the railgun, a large boxy device with several attachments on the sides and a complex layered set of heatsinks on the back.

The business-end, which faced the inside of the railgun’s barrel, was a large circular disk, slightly concave and very reflective. There wasn’t a portal on it yet. Myalis said that portals weren’t energy efficient at the best of times, so this one would act like something of a camera aperture. It would flick open and close the moment the projectile was to pass.

The heatsinks and shit were to regulate the temperature. Both from the projectile, which was passing real close, and from the shift caused by both the portal itself and the vacuum of space doing space vacuum shit.

“Careful,” Major Tinwhistle said.

She’d been spending most of her time this last day or so in the command tents and structure. But this bit was important enough that she was out here herself. I think it was to make sure that her engineers knew that any fuckups would be done right in front of their boss.

Their boss who had a short staff, like a small batton riot cops used. She was using it to point to things, but it looked like it wouldn’t take much effort for that bat to be turned into some good old-fashioned encouragement for anyone that fucked up. I was sure that if she caught someone fooling around, that person would be earning themselves some bruising. Tinwhistle was a tight bundle of nerves at the moment.

“She’s tense,” I muttered to the samurai nearest to me. That meant Princess, Knight, Hedgehog, and Gomorrah.

“That component is one of the most important parts of this project,” Gomorrah said without looking up from a tablet. “It’s valuable.”

“Yeah, ten-thousand points valuable,” I said.

She glanced up. “I meant credit-wise,” she said.

“How much could it be worth?” I asked.

Princess hummed. “It’s a portal to space, but like, it’s still a portal. We don’t have commercial portal technology, right?”

“Not as far as I know,” Knight said. “She’s right. Give a logistics corporation a portal like this and they’ll be making billions from it by the end of the month. If they can reverse engineer it and build their own, then that’s hundreds of billions of credits. Trillions, even.”

“Wait, what?” I asked.

Gomorrah glanced up. “One of the major production bottlenecks is transportation logistics,” she said. “Portal technology would neatly side-step that. Trillions is probably an understatement.”

“Oh… why the fuck hasn’t a samurai sold this then?” Sure, it was expensive as fuck. I could have bought another mech for the same price, but still….

If I may… the main reason is that human technology is still several centuries away from being able to create even the simplest of portals like this one. Not only does humanity’s grasp of mathematics and physics need to improve by several orders of magnitude, humanity at the moment currently lacks the sciences required to build the devices that are required to build the devices that you would need to build the simplest of parts required on a functional portal.

“We’ll get there,” Gomorrah said. So I assumed that Myalis was sending that to everyone.