Build Stuff, Get Money

[Rusty]

In some ways, Rusty had a distinct advantage over his competitors. He did not need to eat. He did not need to sleep. He could power through the 30 hour time period without a break. He didn’t require assistance, so he didn’t require assistants. That solved the space problem right there.

In other ways, he was completely out of his depth. He was, first and foremost, a specialist in the art of violence. All of his products reflected that. There were certainly enough things here to cobble together a weapon, but he didn’t enter this contest just to do the same old thing in the same old way.

There was another issue as well, and it might be insurmountable: not only was he utterly incapable of Alchemy, he couldn’t use the Force in the slightest. Whatever happy accident of crystalline matrices granted some Shards the ability to tap into it had passed him by.

It would be an uphill battle, but in the end, he suspected it would be worth it.

The list of materials was eclectic to the extreme. There was some seriously weird [bleep] here.

Right away Rusty discounted the use of anything alchemical. It was about as useful to him as genitalia on a celibate monk. The [bleep] was he going to do with Svolten rhyolite, whatever the [bleep] that was?

What caught his eye was the stasis pod. That, and the Kerts-Bhrg field generator. The field generator was some truly weird stuff. Apparently, the OG Rebellion had a thing for them, and had used them to hide a fleet inside a star at one point. There had been some reliability issues, but Rusty was willing to bet those had been solved in the intervening 800 years.

It was designed to hold things out, but the Shard was willing to bet that it could also be tuned to hold things in as well. It would take some work, but that was sort of the idea of this thing, right?

If so, the stasis booth could be brought into play. The booth itself was designed to contain the entropy field, which effectively stopped time within its confines. The booth, however, wasn't exactly suited for public viewing. It wasn't like the occupant needed a view, after all.

If he could get the Kerts-Bhrg field turned inside out, it was entirely possible he could strip the entropy field generator from the stasis booth. The field might be dangerous without the booth, or it might not. For what Rusty had in mind, he didn't want to risk using one without the other. The chances of a catastrophic failure were slim, but if it went bang, it would do so in spectacular fashion.

It almost time to start work. All that was missing was the music. Rusty perused his music collection for a moment.

https://youtu.be/M_0cZ658PO0

"That'll do."

 

[Rusty]

There was a show the Captain was fond of where the main character was forever going on about "reversing the polarity of the neutron flow." The statement was patently ridiculous at a glance. Neutrons are neutral, and thus don't have a polarity. Of course, the flow itself could have a polarity, but that was getting into some fields of science that the writers probably weren't aware of.

At any rate, that was more or less exactly what Rusty was trying to do with the Kerts-Bhrg field generator. If he could reverse the polarity of the emitters, then in theory, rather than protecting the inside from outside energies, it should contain whatever fresh hell he developed to go inside it. If it sounded like the Shard was trying to turn the [bleep]ing thing inside out, well, that's exactly what he was doing.

The process was both fiddly and tedious. Even with the patience of a rock, Rusty found it nearly impossible to keep his cool. A steady stream of [bleep]s filled the air, saturating the broadcast with so much prefiltered profanity that it sounded like Morse code at a glance. The producers, at least, wouldn't have to worry about making the broadcast suitable for small children. If the Shard was bleeping himself, so much the better.

It took nearly an hour to get everything completely right. The Shard took a step back and activated the field. The result was a pyramid with a 2 meter by 2 meter square base that was two meters in height. If his math was right, and it usually was, that gave him a volume of about 2.67 cubic meters.

Perfect.

Now all that was left was to test the thing. To do that, Rusty broke out his "specialized tools." In this case, that was a 1 kilogram block of detonite. If the field worked, it should contain the blast perfectly. If it failed, well, it would probably reduce everything in the lab, including the Shard, to wreckage. On the bright side, it would make for some hella interesting television.

Since the field would probably play havoc with a remote detonator, Rusty stuck a timed one in the block of high explosives, set the timer for 30 seconds, put it inside the field, and started the thing up.

The countdown was excruciating. Each second took an eternity. Finally, it got down to the last few seconds.

3...

2...

1...

There was a brief flash, and suddenly the cube became opaque. Unlike the holovids, Rusty knew better than to expect a fireball from the blast. High explosives didn't make fireballs. They decayed into large volumes of gas so rapidly that the resulting shockwave destroyed [bleep]. The gas reached the borders of the field travelling at better than 8 kilometers a second, filling it with an ultradense black cloud that, from the outside, looked as uniform as a block of obsidian.

The readouts showed that the field was under tremendous stress, but everything was showing green for the moment.

That was what Rusty called a success.

If he deactivated the shield, the contained pressure would still likely kill him and crush everything in the lab to itty bitty bits, but he had thought of that. By dialing back the power almost imperceptibly, he could allow the inside to slowly equalize over the course of the next few hours. It would spend that entire time slowly leaking toxic gas into the lab, but [bleep] it. Wasn't like he needed to breathe, and at any rate, the ventilation system was state of the art.

In the mean time, it was high time he started work on the stasis booth.

 

[Rusty]

As it turns out, stasis booths are not meant to be disassembled.

Apparently, someone thought it might be a bad idea to make something that could effectively stop time within a localized area easy to get to. In fact, they thought it was such a bad idea, they made getting to it next to impossible. Next to impossible, however, is not impossible, and Rusty is what one might call stubborn.

The first step was to disconnect all the safeties and failsafes that were supposed to render the entropy field generator useless if removed. There were enough that the Shard suspected someone on the design team had been paranoid bordering on actual mental disorder. Seriously, who the [bleep] would use quantum entangled electrons as a safety? What kind of [bleep]ing [bleep]hole sucking son of a [bleep] and a [bleep] stained [bleep] thought that was a good idea?

The worst part was, not one of the failsafes actually stopped someone from removing the field and jiggering it to work again. All they would do was [bleep] off someone determined to make it work. Granted, the list of people determined enough to pull it off was short indeed, but there wasn't a single person on that list who wasn't scary when given reason to be. And while Rusty wasn't arrogant enough to think he topped the list of scary, he was willing to bet he made the 99th percentile. Someone was due for a meeting with Olga.

While dreams of long range amputation-based assassinations danced through his head, the hours ticked by. 6 of them, to be precise. Removing the field generator was a lot more difficult than he had predicted. The Shard idly wondered if everyone who tried this hated it as much as he did, or if they had some sort of shortcut he wasn't familiar with.

 

[Rusty]

By now the KB Field (that's what we're calling it now) had equalized enough that it could be shut off without destroying the lab. It was well and truly stress tested by this point. Rusty was satisfied that it would perform as necessary.

The next step, now that the entropy field had been removed, was to get it working again. That would be no mean feat, seeing as how the [bleep]ed thing was such a pain to get out. The droid brain from the 3PO unit was called into action once more, after it was wiped and programmed to tell the entropy field's own processor that all the various failsafes were in place and functioning correctly. That in and of itself was a fiddly bit of engineering. The droid brain had processing power for days, but it wasn't necessarily the right sort of processing power. And on top of that, it had to be programmed to speak the same language as the entropy field's processor.

Basically, Rusty was building an OS from scratch from what little he could glean from the layers of the entropy field's processor he could access without cracking proprietary encryption. He was not anyone's idea of a slicer. Sure he could hum a few bars and dance a few steps, but this was industrial grade encryption, and he just didn't have the knowhow to crack it.

Tempus was fugiting right along, but he simply couldn't proceed until he had the entropy field not only working, but controllable.

So far, ten hours had passed. There was still plenty of time, but there was also a lot left to do.

 

[Rusty]

12 hours down, and finally the entropy field was working. In theory, at least. Rusty didn't want to test it without some serious failsafes in place. That was what the KB field was for, after all.

But first, he had to get it down to a manageable size.

Without the stasis booth to confine it, the entropy field was spherical, as most energy fields tended to be. It was probably that he could make the thing conform to the inside of the KB field, but there was literally no science on how the two would interact if they contacted each other directly. It would probably be fine, but it could also potentially tear a hole in spacetime. That was not an ideal outcome.

The idea here was to make the largest possible sphere within the pyramid of the KB field, without having it touch the sides. So that would mean making an inscribed sphere and shrinking it slightly. For a perfect inscribed sphere, Rusty worked out that it would have a total volume of about .476 cubic meters. Shrink that down enough to come out with a safety margin, and you end up with a sphere with a volume of .45 cubic meters. To hell with it. Close enough to count.

Tuning the entropy field was a lot easier than extracting it had been. A lot, lot easier. Basically, it was just a matter of calculating how much power was needed to expand it to the desired diameter. It was tricky without being able to actually activate the thing to test it, but this was one situation where theory would have to suffice.

The next step would be to machine mounts for everything. Precise alignment would be necessary, and that would require some precision machining. That, at least, Rusty was confident he could get right. You don't spend a few centuries turning out high quality firearms without being able to keep track of decimal points.

 

[Rusty]

The first thing to be built was a base. The finished product should ideally be mobile once finished, so not only did the base need to be big enough to hold the equipment, it had to store a power generator as well.

For the base, Rusty welded together a large steel cube. The KB field generator was about two meters wide, so the box was a little larger than that. It was about a meter deep, which left plenty of room inside for the innards. The Shard welded in mounts for the power supply, as well as a base for the droid brain to go. Everything would be sitting on shock mounts, which should allow the device to be safely moved from place to place once it was finished.

He then used a plasma cutter to cut out a square hole on one side of the base, in order to have an access port once everything was said and done. He saved the square of metal removed; it would be the door.

Once everything was welded up, the Shard put the base in a paint booth, where it would be sprayed down with a flat black paint that was also thoroughly nonconductive. That should prevent any potential power leakage, and would also go a long way towards preventing outside signals from interfering.

Now it was time to fabricate the mounts for the field generators. The KB field generator was easy enough. It had four points and could effectively be mounted over the center of the base. A plate would go over it for the sake of aesthetics, with just the emitters above it. The tricky part would be the entropy field. Its emitter would have to go inside the KB field, and to do that, it would have to breach it at some point in order to A: get power and B: support itself.

That conundrum nearly derailed the whole project, but then Rusty realized that he had a big box of lightsaber crystals. Without access to the Force, he couldn't build a lightsaber, but the crystals were invaluable for their unique properties. They could be used to focus energy, or if used correctly, transmit it along without interruption. So with that in mind, he measured out the circumference of the entropy field generator's base, then figured out how many crystals it would take to ring it. The crystals were cut and polished to form a single contiguous ring, and in order to make sure they would transmit properly, the Shard used a laser and a harmonics resonation detector tuned to the frequency of the KB field. It took nearly three hours just to make sure the crystal ring would pass the field without interference, but pass it it did.

Once everything was lined up, the Shard took it back apart. The top needed paint.

 

[Rusty]

The base came out of the paint booth ready to go. Rusty began work on wiring and installing the components.

The power cells went in first. They were going to be pretty frigging important to making this whole thing work, seeing as how it would use a tremendous amount of energy. Fortunately, they had been supplied with some seriously good stuff. The problem wouldn't be making sure he had enough, the problem would be making sure he didn't accidentally fry something. Just inside the access door was a complicated looking fuse box that would prevent just such an occurrence. Everything was wired and safetied in triplicate. It was theoretically possible for it to all go tits up, but it would take a lot of doing.

Once the power cells were in, the droid brain that would convince the entropy field generator was mounted and wired in. There were an awful lot of data cables here as well. The four cubic meters may have seemed like a lot of room, but considering all the work that had to go into making this thing work, it really wasn't.

While all this was going on, the cover plate that would cover the emitters was in the paint booth, receiving the same special coat of paint.

It was almost time to install the generators, but not quite. The Shard ran a series of tests at the electrical leads, ensuring that the precise amount of energy would be transmitted to each one. It was a good thing he did, because there were several that required some tuning. Just as he thought, the sheer efficiency of the power cells was throwing him off ever so slightly; his normal stock wasn't quite this good. It was certainly nothing insurmountable, but the Shard had to take extra care to make sure that it all went right.

By the time the cover came out of the paint booth, twenty hours had passed.

The KB field generator was installed, and the power leads were in place for the entropy field. The cover was carefully installed, and once the fit had been confirmed to be within the extremely tight tolerances, the base for the entropy field generator was installed. Rusty still wanted to test it before installing the field generator itself.

 

[Rusty]

When activated, there was a slight energy eddy around the crystal ring. Rusty immediately shut the field down and ran the math to figure out what the eddy was all about.

Sonogram measurements didn't turn up anything significant. They were amazingly precise up to a certain point but lacked the resolution to get down to the molecular level. Millimeter wave X-rays didn't detect any microscopic flaws. Finally, the electron microscope picked up the problem: there was a microscopic bur, barely perceptible. It was the problem.

Slowly, atom by atom, the bur was deconstructed. That was an advantage of this particular instrument: it could manipulate matter on the smallest level. It wasn't easy, but it was definitely worth it.

A full day had passed by this point.

The crystal ring was reinstalled and carefully aligned. This was a device that required on incredible precision, at least at this phase. More so than the fields themselves, the crystal ring was going to be a fiddly little [bleep], but there was nothing to be done for it. Rusty figured it would have to be removed before the device could be transported. It was just too fragile.

Once the ring was back in place, the Shard fired up the generator and bombarded it with every sort of scan he had on hand. It was working beautifully. The ring was allowing the KB field to pass through without any trouble whatsoever.

The potential gap in the shield was a problem. If something did go explosively wrong, the crystal ring would be a weak spot from which potential trouble might escape. That, however, wasn't as much a concern as one might thing. If something truly did go wrong, it only sat a few millimeters above the field itself. At the first sign of overpressure, it would be pushed downwards, and the KB field would slice through the base with little difficulty, thus sealing the gap. There was a slight chance this might happen accidentally, but the minute the base was severed from power, the entropy field would be deactivated, thus preventing any catastrophic spacetime accidents.

 

[Rusty]

Now it was time to mount the entropy field generator. It was aligned with the same care as everything else. Again, the fit was checked time and time again. There were only five hours left in the contest, but there could have been five minutes left and Rusty wouldn't rush this thing. He wasn't about to try to take shortcuts when dealing with something that had the potential to go wrong on this scale.

It took an hour to get everything hooked up right. With four hours left to go, it was finally time to fire it up.

First went the KB field. It immediately fired up. Everything was running, and it was running well. That was a good sign. There were no harmonics that might make the field unnecessarily weak. That was excellent news.

Next, Rusty fired up the entropy field. It was strictly empty at this point, which was just as well. Rusty didn't want any variables to contend with. All his instruments confirmed that it was on and it was working, but it was kinda hard to actually see for sure, seeing as how they basically stopped dead when they reached the center.

That was a sign that something was happening, but not necessarily what. To test out whether or not the field was actually working, Rusty had to put something inside that could be viewed from out.

Fortunately, he already had a plan for that.

The fields were shut down, and some sturdy wire was used to mount a child's sparkler, a simple firework that threw out sparks, within the entropy field's area of effect.

It was lit. Rusty stepped back and turned on the fields.

The sparks suddenly froze, brilliantly bright, but perfectly still.

Everything was working fine. This was perfect. Rusty shut the fields down, quickly extinguished the sparkler, and got to work fabricating the mounts for the final product.

 

[Rusty]

The final result was ready to go.

From the TIE fighter ejection seat came the one of the maneuvering jets that would allow it to not smash into something upon egress from the fighter. That went on one bracket.

On the other bracket went the hardback copy of The Little Black Book.

Rusty lit the fuse on the rocket.

As soon as the fuse was lit, Rusty activated the KB-field.

The jet of flame shot out and began to wreak havoc on the book. As soon as the flame bored through the cover, the Shard activated the entropy field.

Time stopped.

It was a perfect tableau of destruction. The jet of flame pouring out of the rocket, the smoke pouring off the book, the sparks flying. It was a thing of beauty, at least as far as Rusty was concerned.

It had taken 28 hours and thirty-seven minutes, but for the first time in his life, he had made art. This was a complicated device that served no other purpose other than to exist for its own sake. It did not take likes. It didn't save them either, and really, aside from some nifty bits of engineering, it did nothing to advance the knowledge base of the world. It was utterly beautiful and utterly useless.

In other words, art.