Marty opened the pouch and handed me my phone. It was time to test out my new toys.
I opened my bag of tools and began pulling them out and setting them on the table. Two anonymous metal boxes without switches or ports of any kind. They were both roughly the size of a cigar box. My Interface quickly labeled them both for me.
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Earth-tech Manipulator V1, designed by Jake Monde
I made this device to help me manipulate Earth electronic and mechanical systems using Union tools.
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Portable Zeropoint Energy Generator
A scaled-down, easily portable Zeropoint generator.
50 PU/sec generated, 1000 PU internal storage.
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I made sure they were touching each other and with a flick of my will, the portable energy generator was providing power to my Manipulator.
Marty watched, curious, but said nothing. The Interface showed me a translucent green volume floating above the Manipulator. A control panel floated in the air to one side, a primitive UI offering me only one button, greyed out. It said Lock.
I placed the phone into the green volume and it floated there, hovering two inches above the surface of the metal box.
"Cool," Marty said.
With a flick of my hand, I pressed the now-enabled Lock button on my control panel. The green volume turned red as the field locked the phone into place. Now as long as the power held out, the phone would be unable to move even a micron, relative to the Manipulator.
The Manipulator said it was designed by me, but really it was a group effort. Brick provided most of the code, and Metra helped with some of the engineering. With it, I could visualize, simulate, and modify our primitive Earth tech using the Interface and my Engineering vision Augment. It had seemed like an obvious tool to me, but apparently it hadn't been. I'd had to create it.
A scaled-up diagram of the guts of the phone appeared. It wasn't actually a circuit diagram. I'd designed the Manipulator to use the same systems as the Component Flow Visualization feature of my Engineering vision Augment. The entirety of the phone, operating system and all, was exposed to me.
The system worked a lot like the design console in the Manufactory back on the station. I could move components around, cut things out, and simulate the results. In addition to that, I had the Brick-supplied tools for testing Earth-tech software systems. There wasn't anything I couldn't do to this phone, within reason.
The first thing I did was make the whole thing stronger. I wasn't the kind of guy that was always breaking his phone screen, but it wasn't a big deal to add a carbon lattice to make the phone more like a slab of structural diamond than plastic.
Then I shrunk the battery. Chemical energy storage was so passé. The old battery was most of the phone, and I replaced it with something ten times the capacity and less than one-hundredth the size. That'd give me plenty of space inside for what I needed to do. It was trivial to also give it the means to take power in the Union standard way, simply from being in contact with me and my power Augment.
After a few minutes studying the gestalt of firmware and software, I found that Theo was right. The phone itself was full of backdoors—several at the chip level, and more at various levels of the software. I excised those. No more using my phone as a listening device, thanks. And no more tracking my position, ever. It wouldn't be quite that simple; if I connected to the network, someone would have information about where I was, but I could deal with that.
Finally it was time for the fun stuff. I brought up the Union components list and began searching for what I needed. It didn't take long to find all of the components for an ultra-minimal gate. Everything laid out just fit in the space where the battery used to be.
It would open a gate aperture that was barely visible to the naked eye, allowing for a relatively low-bandwidth Interface connection to Brick on the other side, and not much else. Opening the initial connection would take 750 power units, more than my internal power Augment could provide, and far more than the battery could store. My portable Zeropoint generator could handle it, however.
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A spatial microgate, sufficient for real-time communication and data transfer. Initial energy cost must be provided locally, ongoing energy costs can optionally be provided by corresponding gate.
Initial connection energy consumption: 750 PU, ongoing energy cost: 100 PU/second.
Cost: 120 Nanite Clusters, 3g metals, tier 2, 2g exotics, tier 2, 1g radioactives, tier 2
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Marty had long since gotten bored with watching me sitting and staring into the empty space above my hovering phone. He had picked up a book from a nearby shelf and was flipping through it. He perked up when I pulled one of my bags up onto my lap and started rooting through it.
"Is something interesting finally going to happen?" Marty asked and set the book aside.
The materials cost for my modifications was tiny, almost nothing except for the tiny amount of exotics used in the gate mechanism. The real cost was the Nanite Clusters. Since there was no Manufactory to do the heavy lifting, the Nanite Clusters had to be guided by the Manipulator to make the Union components or the various modifications in situ. Still, I could afford it, and I needed this gate.
"Yes, I've been designing some modifications for this phone and I'm going to make them now."
Once I'd placed the bar of tier 2 metal and the small container of tier 3 exotics next to the Manipulator I pressed the Execute button without hesitation.
Black Nanites flowed from my right hand, swarming
