HEART OF THE WORLD
MACKENZIE COUNTY, AB
10 NOV 2011, 23:49 MST
“Hey Duncan, can you get your head out of Engineering mode for a minute?” called Gwen from the cavern.
“Doot-deet, the persona you have called cannot come to the phone right now. Can I take a message?” asked Donna.
“Be serious. This is important, we’ve got the enchantment framework in place, and now we have to scribe the rules of magic. We get one shot at this, it needs to be right.”
Duncan was forcibly yanked out of his design-fugue, and left the drone fabricator unfinished but tagged with his intentions. “What?”
“War council time, Gwen needs our input.”
The triumvirate appeared in the crystal chamber, and took a moment to admire the beauty of the crystal and the spherical enchantment that was glowing within it. “Looks like you’ve got it well under way.”
“That’s the thing. I can just copy the old design from your scan... but I think we understand it well enough to see how it enforced magic censorship, the payment rule, and all that.”
“Silver?”
“That and the cycle between lunar and solar appear to be intrinsic properties of magic itself.”
“I’d like to ditch the censorship. It’s basically pointless now anyway, everyone knows about magic.”
Gwen’s gemstone body bobbed up and down in an approximation of a nod. “However, there’s the issue of your antimatter toys, and Toronto.”
“Ah. That. Should we ban high-energy physics in general? No touching antimatter or anything with a halflife under a millenia?”
“You used deuterium fusion in Toronto, or tried to,” noted Gwen.
“Grr, fine. How would you fix it?”
“No plasma?”
“I suppose that’d cover it, but it feels like we’re focussing in the wrong direction. Censorship seemed to care about intent. You could say ‘magic’ if you were talking about stage magic, for example.”
“So no... intentionally creating high energy weaponry? That feels like you could wriggle out of it.”
“Maybe we should ask Ray?” suggested Donna.
They pinged Gwen’s crystal link to the Blue Vixen, and Ray picked up promptly. “How are you holding up?”
“First wave is about half an hour out,” replied Duncan. “We’re trying to figure out the new rules for magic, and we want to take magic nukes off the table.”
“That certainly sounds wise. Is magic censorship coming back? The girls have been really happy with its absence.”
“No, that’s toast,” replied Gwen.
“Good. I think. Perhaps there should be some limits, though. Magic in private, but results of magic okay around the town?”
“That’d be tricky, we were hoping to just ditch the rule entirely. Still, the ‘in private’ part could be retasked easily enough.”
“I suppose,” conceded Duncan grumpily. “We can work around it if we need to. Dust clouds, and the like. Being able to talk about it, and walk outside in the right body... that’ll do.”
“Okay. Back to the physics thing...”
“What about mind control?” asked Ray. “Hasn’t that been a huge problem?”
“Well, yeah. Is there any good reason to allow it?”
“No,” growled Duncan.
“I can think of one reason,” chimed Dia. “The headbands are a kind of mind control.”
“Augh. Can we carve out useful versions? Or fun stuff?”
That led to a round of unproductive bickering that only stopped when Ray called a halt to it. “Maybe we can look at this another way. No using magic on a person without their consent.”
“That’s already in there,” said Gwen. “It got lost in the layering and the war, but... we could give it teeth. Backlash if the subject is unwilling, like you did that one time, Donna, at Crazy Eights. It was mostly pretend when you got absorbed into the chair...”
“Not entirely pretend, there was definitely pushback. Beefing that up would certainly help. What about the booby-trapped loyalty spells? Some people will agree to them as a sort of super-NDA.”
“Better inspection, which becomes way easier when we’re not talking around magic censorship,” replied Ray.
“Agreed, we can add that easily enough. I think it would have happened anyway, without the extra layers on top. Now can we please settle the physics question?”
“No hot isotopes, no deliberately compressing plasma to the point where it spits neutrons,” suggested Duncan.
“And your antimatter toys?” asked Gwen.
“Fine, no manipulating antimatter.”
“While I’d like to know what you’re doing with antimatter... I think I can guess enough to not want to know the details. Or be anywhere near you while you’re doing it. Are you following rule #1 regarding antimatter grenades?” asked Ray.
“Is that ‘Be immune to them’?” asked Duncan.
“More to do with minimum safe distances... but I suppose if your personal minimum safe distance is zero, it qualifies.”
“Can we stop this and settle on the rule?” Gwen fretted. “We’re on a clock here.”
“Duncan. What loopholes do you see?”
“Construction of cyclotrons and colliders to gather antimatter the conventional way. Moving existing weapons without touching the materials. Oh, and enhancing the non-nuclear materials to refine the design and increase yield. On the plus side, being able to confine existing plasma would let me stop a nuke. Or, again, tweak its yield by letting it ‘burn’ for longer. Depending on the cutoff half-life, I could fill an area with an isotope just over the threshold and make it uninhabitable.”
“Ouch. Um...”
“Realistically, none of that is worse than the existing nuclear arsenals. Half of it requires borrowing said weapons, which is well outside the scope of what we can lock down.”
“Fine,” muttered Gwen. “Isotopes, antimatter, and plasma it is.”
“Plasma compression. I’d still like to be able to guide and channel existing ones. Oh, one really important question... when does this kick in? I’ve got a bunch of antimatter warheads upstairs, and if they’re going to light off in a few minutes I should get rid of them.”
“As best we can determine, none of the rules will be in effect until the enchantment is fully complete and sealed. So the demons should be forbidden at the same time. You won’t have to fight without your toys.”
Duncan sighed audibly with relief. “Then I agree to the plan. Hope it doesn’t come back and bite us on the butt.”
“I’m sure it will, but I have faith in your ability to solve problems. Now let me get to work.”
Duncan teleported back to the surface, but left the link open with Ray. “Want to see all the toys?”
“Oh heck yes. What’ve you got?”
Ducan’s defences were layered, with the bigger and longer-range systems close in. There was a collection of lasers and masers tuned to a broad variety of frequencies, to see if any of them worked. A few of the lasers were cobalt-doped, in the hopes that would make the beam more effective. It had a side effect of reducing the collimation, so the doped lasers were only effective out to a couple kilometers.
The next circle was a ring of drone factories and launchers. Duncan hadn’t quite finalized the design. The warhead was cobalt laced and similar to one of the more successful American designs. In addition, Duncan had added a pair of micro-flechette launchers to gun down anything near the drone. “It feels like it needs something akin to flares, but I haven’t a clue what would work against these things.”
“Maybe a magnesium-cobalt mix?” suggested Ray.
Duncan added that to the design and started production. “It’ll have to do.”
Outside that was a ring of plasma projectors. Their range in-atmosphere was somewhat limited, but Duncan had worked out a way to keep the packets stable for long enough to give them an effective range of several kilometers before they burst. As with the other weapons, cobalt was seeded into the plasma to boost effectiveness.
The last layer was an enormous field of flechette cannon of varying sizes. “Mixed targeting envelopes, to try to keep them from engaging the same targets multiple times. I don’t have the time to figure out a networked solution, so they’re all auto-targeting, with various randomization and backoff to minimize collision.”
“It looks fantastic,” agreed Ray. “And more than a little terrifying. Any mines, or pop-up turrets in case they figure out countermeasures?”
“There will be, thanks.”
Duncan added a variety of mines, many designed to project their fragments far into the sky, as his foes were airborne. A network of tunnels grew from the center base, providing power and supply lines to an immense array of coilguns. These ones would not run out of shots until the Moon set.
Duncan was in the middle of adding a sixth variant to the drone production lines when Agent Carson called.
After the conversation concluded, Duncan headed back down to the chamber to check on progress.
Gwen grumped at them. “Try not to joggle our elbow. This is delicate work.”
“You don’t even have an elbow.”
“Point still stands. But before you go, I want you to cross check our demon patterns. The monkeys and rhinos were already in the old Worldstone, but the little guys are new. You saw one with the President, and we have footage of the ones that attacked the gunship. Are they the same?”
Duncan reviewed the camera footage quickly. “They look the same. How late can you add more designs? I’ll likely get a better look at those soon.”
“I’ve left a few open slots, so... pretty much any time up until we finish the outer shell of the enchantment. After that... well, hopefully whatever we missed can be dealt with by conventional weaponry.”
“Their pattern so far has always been one new design per turning. We should be fine.”
Duncan hesitated. “There’s one other big problem with our defences.”
“Oh? You showed me the designs, they positively bristle with threat.”
“I need to be up there to adjust and run things. If anything gets through... they do a lot of damage to souls.”
Gwen’s full attention was on the triumvirate now. “You are not seriously...”
“I wish to separate my soul,” said Duncan softly, then groaned in pain as their crystalline body shattered. Shards of them danced and whirled, settling into two structures. A smaller, radiant crystal next to Gwen, and a larger dark one.
“Jesus, D. That’s insane.”
“I know. I am. I must be, to win this. Keep it safe for me.”
“Who’s going to keep the world safe from you?” asked Gwen.
“You must.”