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[Story][Season 0] Bootstrap 2
[Story][Season 0] Bootstrap 2
#1
Bootstrap 2 - 31/May/2012
Late Autumn, 2007, UK.
Brains would be the front of the queue.  To agree that his first bootstrapping hadn't been an unqualified success.  A great deal of work.  His best efforts and much lack of sleep for more than a week.  And, all he had was a framed Victorian picture of a girl, cradling a cloth cat.  That scared the life out of him.
He'd gone back to first principles.  He had to understand handwavium.  After several attempts he had a toy tricorder which could detect even minute qualities of it.  And, he was learning to interpret the display so he could tell how much, and of what type.
The Victorian picture did not show up at all on his 'w-scanner'.  Nor did the area where he'd done the ritual, though he'd literally painted it all over.  All totally clean.  Thank you, Emily.
The weather had been quite kind, so far, but he was sure Autumn was going to bite, pretty soon.  He'd made quite a load of money, lately, with animated dioramas for a number of TV channels.  They were impressed by the accuracy he managed, and, how quickly he could provide them with high quality footage.  They wouldn't believe him when he said he wasn't using secret cutting-edge computer animation.  And, they really liked the individualism of the figures.
Careful investigation had lead him to the idea of a clay pit, such as used in many old episodes of Doctor Who.  He'd been finding just what sorts of ultra materials[1] he could handwavium up, and so far 'Doc' Smith's dureum led the pack for toughness, and Campbell's lux and relux for strength combined with exotic properties.  The first having a density 200 times water, and the later two about a 100 times, meant he had to be very careful who found out about them.
He thought he'd been careful, but obviously not careful enough.  He'd waved his wheelchair.  Now it would fold not just to go in the boot of a car, but into a walking frame.  What really worried him was he couldn't spot any downsides.
The MEMS tip alarm had become some sort of flight system.  The rain cape which he'd jokingly referred to as his 'invisible forcefield' now was.  His 'magic' hot cup provided pure water/ OJ/ tasteless pap labelled 'Nutrition'.  One of his diapers had become 'ever clean' - some sort of waste disposal/recycling system; he suspected it might be feeding the hot cup.  Too many late nights watching space flight on 'Discovery' channel...
Loggy with lack of sleep when he'd first noticed this, he'd remarked out loud that all it needed was air regeneration, and a (Niven?) electro-stim anti-muscle wastage gadget.  Then found in the morning, after thirteen hours sleep, his 'keep fresh' ionic air-freshener and his auto-exerciser had somehow been incorporated.  Sleep tinkering?
That was the final straw.  He'd build a negative pressure hood inside which he did all his small-scale handwavium work, and, later added isolator gloves and waldos.  At every break, and at the end of the day, he did a careful sweep of his workshop, and himself, with the w-meter.  No food or drink ever went anywhere near the workshop, and he'd added an automatic w-alarm to the doorway.  And an emergency shower unit for accidents.
He was wrong about the wheelchair not having any problems.  Over the years he'd joked that being in a wheelchair made him invisible.  As much as a six-foot tall, ex-Rugby playing, stocky build man, with brilliant green eyes and bright red hair could be.  Now he found that unless he deliberately drew people's attention, their eyes just slid past him.  This didn't apply when the chair folded into walking mode, but the shock of his sudden 'appearance', and several near heart attacks, led him to restrict this to climbing stairs, certainly where anyone could see him.
A wheelchair that made him more socially isolated didn't strike him as being the sort of 'self improvement' that Emily had implied he needed.  But, it led him to thinking about means of going invisible, remaining undetected, which seemed wise given the fuss starting to be made about handwavium.  Meta materials, with negative refractive indexes, bending light and radar around them.  Super carbon black, absorbing all wavelengths.  Seemed a good start.
He'd started to experiment with 5 micron mylar, polyester, sheet[2].  Previously he'd used this for model work, sometimes coated with tissue, and he'd found its already amazing strength-for-weight could be boosted by waving.  With careful use of heat and paint you could shape it, and make it look like anything. Taking this to the next level mylar could be waved into dureum, lux or relux, and become nearly indestructible.
Though, you'd to be really careful with the edges, and he'd developed a regime of carefully rolling them to avoid limb-threatening 'paper cuts'.  You could probably take someone's head off with a dureum frisbee bowler hat...
The wheelchair had tempted him in ways he couldn't resist.  It seemed to be able to fly, sliding through the air to cause minimum turbulence, at up to 300mph, then above 65mls go into some mode he thought they called 'speed drive'.  The view from the edge of space had been spectacular.  He could be anywhere on the planet in under an hour, and half of that was the journey through atmosphere at each end.  The brief New Zealand visit, to watch his elder brother's family, from a distance, had been fun.
What annoyed him was he hadn't planned the wheelchair, so he didn't know how it worked, what logic it followed, even whether the batteries might fail at some unfortunate time.  Careful study of SF space drives had led him to suspect Prof Laithwaite's[3] gyroscopic anti-gravity.  A test vehicle, literally a flying crate, seemed to operate happily using a pair of MEMs gyroscopes, powered by an old car battery, directed by a model plane remote control.  One of the pair seemed to give zero gravity, the other thrust and artificial gravity, which seemed to include protection from acceleration.
The crate amused him because it reminded of Blish's[4] "Welcome to Mars" - a boy makes the first Mars flight and human landing in a packing crate.  But, the spin-dizzy of "Cities in Flight" also came to mind, and the idea of a city like New York going to the stars was a bit terrifying.  Throwing planets around was probably best left to 'Doc' Smith.
The idea of spotting when people were observing you seemed a good idea, and an excellent way of checking if your invisibility was working right.  The 'now you see me, now you don't' problem with the wheelchair proved an excellent tool for checking this.  His 'obs-detector' seemed to work for humans, and gadgets, even AIs he later discovered, but not animals - strange...  Maybe his initials being 'OBS' helped him develop this?
All this pondering, and R&D, led him back to his back garden, early one Autumn evening, checking he wasn't observed.
He'd assembled his 'work horse' a few nights ago, a 2m diameter cylinder, 6m long, 'cigar shape', and found its invisible hull worked fine.  Then, the last few days out-fitting it, in the near-derelict garage, just beyond the edge of his property.  Not as nimble as the wheelchair, but capable of hauling plenty of mass.  The mylar pressure dome was folded and stored, on-board, as was the compressor, and, he hoped, all the bamboo poles and mylar rolls he'd need to use.  And the paint.  Couldn't forget the paint.
Ten hours later he was done with the clay pit.  The shell of his new craft, curing nicely, and already properly invisible, was gravity-tethered over a nearby disused air field.  Mylar sheet had become dureum strips, pre-shaped into hoops and struts.  The pressure dome reduced the amount of handwavium being sprayed in all directions, and an electro-static charge directed it to where it was needed.  Finally, fitting and spraying an outer sheath of layered dureum, relux and lux.  His w-scanner said his wheelchair forcefield had kept him clean.
The 'work boat' as a 6m diameter cylinder, 20m long, 'cigar shape', should be good enough for any of his purposes, and he could spend the Winter months drawing and waving circuitry onto the insides, with the odd MEMs device, or focus crystal.  Two floors, in most parts. Drive, accumulator banks, force fields, passive sensor array, emergency drive, emergency force fields, air and water regeneration...  Then, in Spring, he could add living quarters and tidy-up the on-board workshop.
Later, he wondered if he'd made a mistake.  His work horse was just too long to fit in the standard parking spaces used in Fenspace.  But, maybe people wouldn't have liked a permanently invisible 'truck'.  And, people trying to park where you already were parked might've got annoying.
At least he could be quite sure that neither his work horse, or boat, should develop AI.  Emily had scared him off that; point-and-shoot navigation should be good enough for any journeys he planned.  'Doc' Smith technology at least had the great virtue of not needing any computer support.
Though, getting a very basic mobile phone, and waving it up to an all-band monitor and communicator might be wise?  Hmm.  Now, how'd he shield that, and any other electronics on board, so no one'd detect them?  'Doc' Smith or some other technology?
Of course, if he wanted to travel in real safety, something like an invisible 'Doc' Smith mauler would be nice.  But, at 300m length you could really get lost in there.  And, that's an awful lot of mylar...
--
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" - Hawkwind
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#2
Throwing aroud references left and right. :p

I like it.
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#3
And thus we see the advantages of a rboad reference pool too. Christ, you're making me feel inferior ;P. This is some of the best stuff's that's come out of Fenspace in a while.
________________________________
--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?
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#4
META "Bootstrap 2"

I wasn't sure about posting this. However, it forms the basis of most everything else Brains does later, even though it is basically introspection, and action-free (bar building stuff). This is also the final story in Chapter 1, which means I've posted all the 'getting started' bits of this character.

Abuse of handwavium: ignoring the wheelchair to personal spaceship, which is basically an accident (and he doesn't fully trust it) the main possible abuse here is the use of handwavium to transmute mylar sheet into ultra-dense fictional materials with specific properties. No actual matter is created, either from energy or just nowhere, in this process, but a lot of papier mache (made from old newspapers, water and handwavium) is used in the first vehicle, and in the second a lot of clay (extracted from a clay pit by handwavium). For each different material a specific strain of handwavium paint was developed.  And Brains doesn't plan on passing these out, without some really good reasons.

There is also the really weird device the "observation detector", which is based on the (possibly mythical) idea that people can feel if they are being stared at - the making someone touch the back of their neck by staring at it, or make them turn and look around, bit. The 'hairs on the back of your neck' effect. This gadgets just gives a yes/no as to whether you're being observed.

Am I pushing my luck here?
--
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" - Hawkwind
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#5
If a laptop computer can tell when it's being looked at, then a simple detector can do the same thing - especially when that's the purpose of the detector.

I'd say you're on solid ground here.
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."

- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012
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