Safe Harbor is quiet. Word has gotten around about what happened, and people aren’t sure what comes next.
Otto, as the senior Newman left in the city, takes it upon himself to round up everyone that was at the fateful meeting for a face-to-face. He talks about Leo’s experiences as a child, the trauma his father inflicted on him, and the horrific abuse and later battle with the Atlantean commander Saito. He talks about Leo’s recovery, and the hand Aria and himself had in it. He lays it out factually. He doesn’t ask for forgiveness for Leo’s actions, just understanding of the circumstances behind it.
He knows this is going to take time to process, so leaves it at that.
He meets with the seven people Aria entrusted with Safe Harbor’s near term future. They’re a mixture of human ex-captives and Atlantean Blood. They’re scientists, scholars, and poets for the post part. One is a human biomechanic who worked on Atlantean systems, not anyone’s idea of an authority figure, but he quickly realizes what Aria saw in the guy - an easy familiarity around everyone, from squid hybrids to giant robots. The city’s leadership, he feels, is in good hands.
His next stop is Mo’s workshop. The taciturn rescue robot’s experiments in using plasma and magnetic fields to quickly mass-produce Newman-type carbon allotropes has been promising. Can it be scaled up? Can Safe Harbor grow, if there’s enough raw materials and power to feed into the fabricator?
“Maybe,” is Mo’s answer.
“Dammit, dude, I need something here,” Otto protests. “The world’s going to shit faster than we’re able to grow. Sooner or later someone’s gonna get another metamaterial railgun army equipped, shoot us full of holes, and we’re gonna need replacement shells but quick. You got a great idea here. I need to know how reliable it is.”
Mo shrugs. “Dunno.”
“Well you’ve been using it, right?” Otto asks. “It built those spare drones we used on the operation?”
“Yeah.”
“So it works.”
“Sorta.”
Otto wants to point a finger in his face, but feels that would be rude. Plus, Mo in his full-sized robot mode is taller than Otto himself. For all his talk of being ‘the big guy’, Otto is now the weenie of the group, and it irks him.
Instead, he holds out his hands in a conciliatory gesture. “I know you get the importance of it. Lemme try a different tack. What’s blockin’ you from making this thing work as reliably as we need?”
Mo hmms. “Time,” he says finally.
Otto lets out a sigh. “Okay. Just… Just put in the time, alright? Anything else, anything that’s a distraction from making it solid, you bring to me and I’ll solve it.”
“Raw materials, and power,” Mo says.
“Yeah. I’ll get on that right now,” Otto promises with a smile.
The Casimir Fractal is a superscience invention that’s existed for decades. Rossum used it, which is how knowledge of it fell into Leo’s hands. One Fractal can breed another one - although what “one fractal” means is up for debate. It’s the most reliable power source known to man - it simply extracts electrons from the a quirk of physical law - but it’s limited. Leo worked around that by letting juice accumulate in high-capacity graphene batteries of his own design, but it still takes time to build up usable amounts of oomph.
Otto needs something more muscular, that also won’t blow up in his - or the city’s - face.
Of all the candidates he’s aware of, nuclear fusion is the safest. Take deuterium or tritium, put a whole lot of energy into containing the reaction, hopefully get more energy out of it. The theoretical problems are more or less solved, and fusion power plants have been up and running for awhile. The biggest hurdles are in engineering the parts, pushback from traditionalists in the energy sector, and aggressive legislation.
Fine. He’ll just have to somehow find a physicist and a team of engineers. No problem.
He sighs. Saving the world is looking less and less easy by the hour.
He finds Big Bill performing maintenance on the Launch System, and joins in.
The big robot is normally more talkative than Mo, but recent event seem to have taken the wind out of his sails. It sounds strange to describe a robot this way, but all Otto can think is that he’s doing the maintenance - well, mechanically.
Finally Otto decides he needs to say something. Anything.
“You working on anything like Mo’s fabricator? Or just having fun down here playing with the Hula Hoop all day?”
Big Bill blinks, and turns to his fellow Newman in surprise. “Me? Naw. I got an upgraded PINNACLE brain, sure, but I’m just not the inventing type. Shucks, I can barely fly a plane!”
Otto laughs at the joke, but grows more serious. “Yeah, maybe you’re more of a people person. Well you’re in luck, my friend. We got people problems.”
“Whatcha got?” Bill asks curiously.
Otto spreads his hands in a helpless shrug. “What’s all this teleportation stuff for, if we don’t know where we’re going? What does it mean to rescue people, if we don’t know which people need rescuing? We’ve been pretty ad-hoc so far. Listening to the news, tips from people we know. I think we could maybe swing an ASIST group account since it’s theoretically international. I need someone to brainstorm more ways to track down people in need.”
Otto takes a breath, and gets to the hard part. “Most of all, I need a way not only to get more data, but to filter it. Find all trouble spots, sort by urgency. See what you can do to come up with a brilliant solution there. Failing that, find someone who does this professionally and get them to build us a system to do it.”
“I’ll sure try,” Big Bill says with a reassuring enthusiasm.
Otto smiles. “Great. Oh, hey, any idea where Summer went?”
“Ibiza.”
Otto blinks. “Where’s that?”
“It’s an island off the coast of Spain. She asked that nice superhero lady, Hellenic, about it while she was here, bringin’ the doctor for Leo.”
“Huh. What’d she want with a place like that?” Otto muses aloud.
“She asked about uh, hotspots,” Bill says, after checking his memory for a moment. “Places with lots of people and fun, somethin’ like that.”
Otto lets out a sigh. “Damn party girl. She’s off to make out with some boy and dance the night away.”
Bill’s mood changes slightly, and he hunkers down to look at Otto more closely. “Say, does that, uh, bother you at all? Her, an’ some other fella?”
Otto blinks. “What? No way. Not unless she gets hurt. I mean then, Alycia an’ me got a pact to make that guy regret it.” He slams a solid fist into an open palm.
The jet robot nods. “Well, see, Mo an’ me, we know how ya felt about Miss Aria. What with Summer an’ her bein’, y’know–”
Otto laughs. “I know. And I’ve had time to think about it.”
He straightens up, and looks his friend in the eyes. “Any man would love to have a girlfriend like Aria or Summer. For Leo - and people like him, namely us - she’s the perfect woman. But I was created before her, so did I really inherit Leo’s love for Pneuma herself? Nah. I figured it out awhile ago. The thing was, I was interested in those longings that were in Leo’s head long before Pneuma took shape as a reality. These days, I got different interests.”
Big Bill draws back thoughtfully and nods. “I reckon I see whatcha mean.”
Otto catches Mo wandering into the Launch System, and decides it’s as good a time to ask as any. “Well, what about you fellas? I got kind of a relationship going, but what about the two of you? If either of you are interested in Summer - or anyone else - what’s stopping you from making your moves?”
“Y’don’t give us any free time,” says Mo immediately.
Big Bill chuckles ruefully at that.
Otto sighs. “I can take a hint. Fine. You two jokers go have fun somewhere. I’ll finish up work on the Launch System.”
As the two depart, he shouts after them. “And learn another god damn language some week! It’s a big world, we’re gonna have to start interacting with more people. And you can’t hit on someone with Dr. Mana translating for ya!”