Quant had approached the problem differently than a human probably would. She had a lot of time, and her own semiconductor fabrication and assembly facility. Cost simply wasn’t a factor.
Power consumption and space for a suitable hardware package weren’t an issue either. That was never true of normal computer hardware design.
Rather than try to think her way through the problem, relying on human ingenuity and creativity she couldn’t reproduce, Quant had used brute force methods. She let her rabbit-hole department run wild for years at a time, and anything that looked like it might pan out, she prototyped.
The hardware design Quant ended up with was wildly unconventional. Oh, it would consume a lot of power, and be the size of a modest-sized office building, but she didn’t have to care about those issues.
Quant had been in her new ‘home’ about twenty years now. The availability of all that new processing power had speeded up her other effort, the chemistry and manufacture of strong carbon filaments to be used in mega-construction.
For Quant’s other project was what she called the large transporter, an interstellar ship and transporter that would dwarf the five-hundred-mile cube-shaped transporter she had used to transport the colonies.
Such a large device would be built as a geodesic sphere, the strongest structure possible using a given structural beam. Building it as a geodesic instead of a cube meant that Quant needed a lot of beams. Where the cube only had twelve five-hundred-mile-long beams joining the eight vertices, the geodesic would need thousands of beams.
And they would all be five hundred miles long.
Quant had solved the chemistry problem, and, at the time of the centennial, had purpose-built factories starting to spin the massive carbon-filament tubes.
It would take a long time, but Quant wasn’t in a hurry.
Through her interstellar communicators, Quant still had communications – clandestine communications – with the colonies. She was in a position to monitor the political and other goings-on. The same with Earth, through backdoors she had planted in the computer systems of various computer networks on Earth before she left.
One of the things Quant monitored was the computer, chemistry, physics, and mathematics departments at various universities. Some of the innovations that had gone into her new computer hardware – at least in the early stages – had come out of university computer science departments, particularly those on Earth.
Similarly with the chemistry departments. Some of Quant’s work in carbon chemistry had been informed by efforts ongoing at the chemistry departments of Earth universities.
Quant was monitoring the physics and mathematics departments of the universities, too, but to a different end. She was watching for the theoretical work that would evolve into an interstellar drive. Interstellar travel meant that, sooner or later, the colonies would be in touch with each other and with Earth.
And whenever different political entities made contact, there was an opportunity for war.
It was around the time of the centennial when Quant became aware of the activities of a young mathematician on Arcadia named Chen JieMin.
Quant could see that Chen JieMin was definitely on the track of a hyperspace drive that would put all the colonies within reach of each other. They still didn’t know where any of the others were, and neither did anybody on Earth.
Nevertheless, if he kept up his work, he would close in on the ability to make a hyperspace drive. Quant didn’t think he would stumble on the mechanism for the Lake-Shore Drive, so instantaneous transport wasn’t in reach.
But a hyperspace drive definitely was.
Quant would have to kick her efforts into high gear. She needed the large interstellar transporter.
She began building additional factories, so she could spin the carbon-filament tubes faster.
2362
Government Project
For their seventeenth wedding anniversary, JieMin and ChaoLi went out for dinner at the Chen family’s restaurant in the Uptown Market. The day they celebrated as their wedding day was March twenty-fifth, the Sunday JieMin had asked for and received the blessing of Chen JuPing, who was then Chen Zumu.
That was the day JieMin, just fourteen and a half, had asked the just-turned-sixteen ChaoLi to marry him, and, after speaking with her parents, she had come back to him in his apartment. They had lived together ever since.
Their own eldest child was fourteen now. ChaoPing was babysitting for them tonight. She was watching their other four children: their bank baby and second daughter, LeiTao, who was eleven; the twin boys YanMing and YanJing, who were eight; and their baby boy, JieJun, who was now four years old.
JieMin and ChaoLi had separated her pregnancies by more than normal on Arcadia, so they never had two children under age three at the same time. After four pregnancies and five children, they were done building their family.
JieMin was now thirty-one, and ChaoLi had just turned thirty-three. They had only grown closer over the years, and were very happy in the marriage. They both felt lucky to have made such a good choice of partner.
“Seventeen years. Can you imagine?” ChaoLi asked. “We’ve been married longer than I was alive when we met.”
“And ChaoPing is as old as I was,” JieMin said.
“Not quite. She’s just fourteen. You were fourteen and a half.”
“She is coming up on marriageable age fast, though.”
ChaoLi sighed.
“I know,” she said. “I just hope she picks as well as I did.”
He squeezed her hand on the table.
“We should decide what to order,” he said.
“We haven’t eaten out much lately. They’ve changed the menu all around. We don’t know all of these dishes anymore.”
“Should we start at the top again?”
ChaoLi laughed. She still laughed like little bells.
“With as seldom as we go out now, we’ll never get through the menu,” she said.
“Maybe
