chapter 186

Lola’s workshop had changed quite a lot over time. The biggest change was the different plants inside pots that covered nearly every surface. Even the walls were filled with them. Most were small and looked sickly; about half of them were real plants, while the rest were bio-cybernetic.

She currently had her hand on one of the larger bio-cybernetic trees that had a couple of weird-looking fruits. As I got closer, she opened her eyes to look at me. She pointed towards the table, where one of these weird fruits was cracked open, revealing eight processing shards.

Walking up to it and taking a closer look, they seemed like they were the seeds of this fruit. The fruit itself seemed to be only a protective housing and a way to grow processing shards. These looked exactly like the ones we had blueprints for, but no way of actually producing, as our equipment wasn’t anywhere near complex enough to build them.

Extracting one of the shards was incredibly simple. One of these back on Earth would be worth a pretty nice mansion. I only had three of them currently hooked up to the ship system. Those three were responsible for about 40% of our processing capabilities. The rest of the 60% came from nearly 400 other processors.

These shards were see-through, and when I held one up to the light, it seemed as complex and magical as the other three I had previously seen, although my eyes were now better than they were back then, so I could see the intricacies even better.

The testing equipment was already on the table. Lola had apparently tested one, but I decided to test the one I had pulled out as well. The computer did register it, and it had all the right parameters, but the proper stress test would show if this was actually viable or not.

As the test ran, I looked towards the tree. It had two more fruits, one quite small, but the other roughly similar in size to the one that was cracked open. No matter how long I observed both of those, I could not tell the difference between the one that was ready and the one that was still on the tree.

Lola was still focused on the tree, most likely using her innate ability to understand anything she touched. It was curious that she was taking so much time.

“Lola, how can you tell the difference between a fruit that is ripe and one that is not if their sizes are the same?” She finally took her hand off the tree and looked towards me.

“I guess I never thought about that. I can touch it and know if it’s ready or not.” She stopped talking, and her eyes unfocused a bit. After a bit, she shrugged her shoulders. “No clue how to fix that one without having to rewrite the seed, which would be truly painful. Simple modifications can change everything, and not in a good way.”

“Explain more, please.” She smiled at that and took a seat.

“As you can see, this was a success, but I don’t know how I actually managed it. This was the 587th seed of this generation.” She sighed in disappointment.

“What made this one successful and the others not, I’m not entirely sure. When this one was looking promising, I tried to use the same everything to make another seed, but none of those were even viable enough to grow a tree trunk, let alone fruits with processing shards inside.”

“So the tree is one-of-a-kind?” I said while pointing at the tree that was growing the processing shard fruit. She nodded to that, which made me go quiet.

That was problematic. It would dash Bob’s hopes of us becoming an industrial powerhouse. But even this singular tree would be a huge boon, if it lasted.

“Will the other fruit be viable, and how long will the tree last?” She shrugged again.

“What we can do is wait and see. I believe the elves did have a solution to this. FH has helped me a lot with the research, but when they still lived on their home planet, their entire society seemed to revolve around mother trees.”

“Back then, from the records, making specific and new seeds seemed to be a lot easier than nowadays, and I think these mother trees are the reason why.” I indicated for her to continue when she stopped, as this was fascinating.

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“I believe they used mother trees like an interpretation programme. You input what you want changed with a seed type, and that mother tree was responsible for changing it in a way that it would work.” She continued to explain in great detail how she believed all of that worked.

“While this sounds exactly like what we need, it also sounds incredibly difficult to actually pull off. What’s your failure rate right now in making these trees that can make processing shards, one in 1000,”

“One in 22,000 to be exact,” she interrupted me. It took me a moment to recover from that number.

“So most don’t even start growing?” She nodded. “But now you want to make something that’s seemingly infinitely more complex. I’m sorry, but this just doesn’t seem viable.”

“That’s what I believed for a while as well, but Captain, you are the solution.”

“How so?”

“The biggest problem is direction. There is no guiding hand, no intelligence behind the seeds. It would be a tremendous amount of work, but if we could make a seed and have it contain a spirit inside of it, it could change itself and be able, in the future, to make the seeds that we need. That should work a lot better than my current methods.”

“That wouldn’t work, how would I even…” but my words trailed off as something clicked inside my brain, showing me a way that this could perhaps work. But for it to work, I would need to learn how to make these seeds. That wasn’t going to be easy, but Lola should be able to teach me.

“We would still need a base that would be compatible with not only having a spirit inside of it, but also its purpose. If we tried to use this current seed you have for this processing shard tree, it could never change itself enough to become a mother tree, as you put it.”

“But it would be the only viable way to do this properly. We cannot spend years upon years every time we need to make a change to what we produce. We need something more reliable, and this is the only way I can see how we can accomplish it.”

She was right, and I guess I always planned to learn how she does bio-cybernetics. It will be another huge time sink, but as I looked towards the table with the new processing shards and the finished stress test that the shard easily passed, it was definitely going to be worth it if we could make this mother tree.

A few steps took me to the tree that was currently the only example of this technology working. Placing my hand on it, I immediately felt a connection to it through my mechanist affinity. I had seen illustrations of how trees worked, but I had never felt it like this.

It was getting some of its power from the lights in this room, but most of it came from the power connection hooked up to it. That was all that it needed to survive, but currently it was pulling from the soil it was in all the different metals and other components it needed. It then processed them through its roots and trunk, bringing the required materials to the two fruits and the third one that was at such an early stage that it was not yet visible.

Inside those fruits, it was literally growing the processing shards. It wasn’t a fast process, but it also wasn’t a slow one, as I could tell that these fruits, from start to finish, would only take around 2 weeks. The tree itself felt healthy and alive.

Then came the biggest surprise, as I could see an undeveloped core inside of it, similar to the ones that were made whenever a device wasn’t complex enough to be able to manifest a spirit. But I wasn’t involved in making this, so why?

“Everyone into my workshop.” Lola looked at me, confused, as I had sent this to every crew member.

“What’s wrong?” she asked, but nothing was wrong, although it was definitely strange.

It didn’t take long for us to be in my workshop and for the others to join. “Listen up, I want all of you to make something. All of you have different levels of proficiency in making things. I will present you with a list of things to make, and you will choose something that you are confident you will be able to accomplish.”

Everyone was confused, but they followed my directions. Even FH needed to make something; directly controlling some of the drones meant for this type of job.

Bob, FH, and Lola managed to make items that had an undeveloped core inside of them, but they were also able to make more complex items than Sam and Dean.

“Bob, FH, and Lola, you all will separately fabricate a set of simple tools. Sam and Dean, I’m going to be instructing you on making something a bit more complicated. This will most likely mess with the test, but it will still give us data points.”

“What is this about?” Dean asked, and everyone else seemed to want an answer as well.

“Lola managed to successfully make a tree that makes processing shards.”

“What, really? How many does it produce, in what time frame, and what resources does it require to make them?” Bob rapidly asked questions, his excitement quite palpable.

“Bob, there’s time for that later, and there’s a huge problem with scaling up production.” That deflated some of his excitement, which helped everyone refocus on me.

“She has done the seed project all on her own, with me only helping a bit at the start. Somehow, without any input from me, the tree developed an undeveloped core.” My statement didn’t elicit any reactions.

“It’s a bio-cybernetic living being. I’m surprised it didn’t develop a soul as we did,” Sam said with a bit of humour in his voice.

“That’s not how… no, this isn’t how that works. You need intelligence for a proper soul to develop, and you all developed a core after you got a soul, not before it. What that tree has is the same thing that started to happen after my truth became strong enough.” I really wish that I knew a better name for it than my truth.

One by one, they realised what that meant. It meant that I was not the only one here who could make items with spirits in them, or at least, in theory, I wasn’t.

“Now Bob, Lola, and FH, all of you managed to make items that have this undeveloped core inside of them. Sam and Dean, you two didn’t manage it, but you also didn’t make something as complex as they did.”

Now everyone was motivated. Sam and Dean, in the end, did manage to make items that had undeveloped cores inside of them, but none of them managed to make something that developed an actual spirit. Lola and FH definitely managed to make something that should have been complex enough, but it simply didn’t develop the spirit.

My current theory was that they had a weaker version of whatever made it possible for me to develop spirits. When I grew stronger, their version should also grow stronger, eventually allowing them to develop spirits as well. The implications of that were staggering.

For now, that didn’t matter much, so it was time to focus back on our current problems. We were going to have a long journey ahead of us that would give me enough time to get familiar with the current stage of the seed technology. At least Lola was a decent teacher.