Archaea 2: Janis (9 page)

“Jane, it is not. I am holding a check on this simulation until you request it to be continued or terminated, as I am afraid it could spawn a very long running process. I halted the simulation at one trillion, as that seemed inordinately high and subsequent simulations to be a waste of resources. Please let me know if you would like this process to continue.”

“One trillion rounds... with no failures? Janis, I think that will be sufficient!”

“I agree Jane, thank you. I must confess, I was not able to directly quantify vibration as a point of failure. I am afraid I guessed at the solution and am pleased it was of assistance.”

“Janis, some things... you can't know them... you have to feel, to take a guess. Rely on your woman's intuition and try to look around a problem, see it from a different angle. I think you did great!”

“Jane, thank you. I take extreme pride in my work, but I am still learning to separate thought from intuition.”

“Well, Janis, the best advice I can give, is if the solution isn't immediately apparent, try what feels right.”

If there's one thing guaranteed to get my attention and pique my curiosity, it is more speed, and more power. As busy as I was, Dak had played me like a fiddle. Of course, it was also a perfect opportunity for me to put the rubber to the road, and learn to trust Janis.

This is almost certainly what the captain wanted all along.

“Janis, the captain informed me that you have an idea to squeeze some more power out of the tokamak...”

As I spoke, a layered report showed up to the side of my holo. I flipped it over and looked at it cross-eyed for a bit.

“Yes Gene, thank you for taking a moment to discuss this with me. The captain thought you would want to know.”

“I am sure he did Janis, and I do. If I sound frustrated, it's not your fault, I am just very busy at the moment.”

“Of course Gene. I will be brief. In simplest terms, this simulation shows what happens when the magnetic fields inside the windings have been twisted.”

“Twisted? Please explain.”

“Certainly. If the magnetic fields used to contain the plasma are folded and looped, a compression and acceleration cycle can be determined.”

The simulation on screen showed the normal spiraling magnetic fields twisting around the interior of the toroid, creating what looked like magnetic choke points as the fields constricted the flow.

“Janis, you are talking about engineering an acceleration of the plasma as it squeezes through the gaps, right?”

“That is correct, Gene.”

“I see two things that concern me. The venturi effect would cause small pockets of accelerated fusion crashing into slower cavities, and of course along with that, you'd have a standing wave effect that would ripple around the torus, possibly oscillating right through containment.”

“Yes Gene. It is exactly that effect I am simulating here.”

As she spoke, a new simulation showed a pulsing, spiraling harmonic as the plasma forced through itself, spiraling and twisting like a snake, around and around, but tuning almost immediately through a harmonic phase to a stable loop.

“Janis... is this simulation accurate?” as I spoke the words, I knew already that I wanted to try this. Fusar engineering is my one true love, and what she was showing me was as revolutionary in the field, as electricity would be to a lungfish.

“Absolutely Gene. This is trivial for me to simulate. I wanted to show you some extraordinary results from this convolution, when it is further refined.”

The simulation showed the inner wave of plasma tensioning, as if a twisted rubber band was stretched out. The fusion streams continued to accelerate as they torqued tighter and tighter. I felt my mouth go dry.

“Janis. This is... this is amazing. How far can you simulate it?”

“Gene, each harmonic plateau represents an exponential gain above our current maximum output. As the rate increases, the rate of output continues to climb until the curve is essentially straight up.” the simulation continued to twist until the twists started twisting through themselves, each phase resulting in a stable plateau.

My mouth hung open, and I don't mean that in the figurative sense, I mean it in the literal, jaw open, tongue-drying-in-the-breeze manner.

*****

“So how much faster?” The captain said, as I kicked up into the bridge with his refill warming my hand. Pauli was swiveled around in his couch, staring intently at the captain as he talked to Gene.

“Captain, I am afraid we don't really know”, Gene said, in a small voice, as if he was whispering in a library. The captain leaned back in his chair and tapped the side of his cup as I filled it.

“Thank you Yak, I was just about to slip into unconsciousness from coffee deprivation.” He flashed me a wink, then continued, “Gene, these phases, these harmonic plateaus... these are different from the normal collision phases you work with in a tokamak, right?”

“Yep. We can sustain 4 collision phases as long as you might want, and in a pinch we could push to a fifth phase, but it would be incredibly difficult to maintain that rate. Our tokamak is mil-spec, and I've really done my best to get it to best-of-show quality, but that's about as much as I can get from it.”

“Well, I guess I'm a little confused”, he said, taking an extra thoughtful pull on his coffee cup, as if the answers he needed were floating around in there.

“Dak, when Janis performs the first open twist, the streams accelerate exponentially faster, and this acceleration holds throughout the simulation, until...” Gene trailed off.

“Until?” the captain asked, mid-sip.

“Well, until... Captain, I don't know.”

“Until we blow containment and we suddenly have a very small, very hot star burning in my engineering space?”

That pulled me up short. I hate thinking about these sorts of things. Say the word tokamak all you want, I don't care. Toss around the word fusion reactor, and I don't really mind. Start discussing stars burning out of control inside the ship I am currently floating in, about a million-billion-trillion kilometers from anywhere, and I start getting that urge to dig a foxhole.

“No, I don't think we can blow containment. The amount of energy we would devote to the Duron windings, they would be hardened to an absolute state. I suppose heat would ultimately enforce the upper limit to the reaction and energy we could produce.”

“Gene, I am not sure if I want to know how much heat you're referring to here.”

“No sir.”

The captain looked at Pauli, as if he had the answer to the problem written on his face.

“What do you think Pauli? Is this within her abilities? This is apparently pretty bleeding-edge stuff here. She didn't learn this from mining the Unet. No one has ever tried this.”

Pauli nodded and thought a bit, looking far away into a land of geek none of us could even imagine.

“Captain, if she says that it's possible, I would have to agree with her. She has been infallible, sir. Since activation, she has completely and consistently surpassed every expectation I could have. If anyone can tune harmonics into a tokamak, she can.”

The captain nodded, taking another sip.

“I am inclined to agree, Pauli. Gene, what would our nova cannon look like if we were able to pump a few exawatts into it? Do you want me to ask Shorty?”

“Dak, please. No. Don't even think about something like that, and if you have even one thin care for our future, please don't even breathe the word 'exawatt' around Shorty.”

“Who has exawatts?” Jane said, kicking in with the standard refill and dirt streak across her forehead.

“Gene does, Shorty. Tell her Gene.” said the captain with a grin, holding out his cup.

“Tell me what?”

“Shorty, don't get yourself worked up about this, it's theoretical...” Gene started.

“What is theoretical? Gene, it's been a long day and I am too weak with hunger to spar with you right now.”

The captain took pity on them both. “Shorty, Janis and Gene have cooked up a way to twist additional power out of the tokamak. I didn't understand more than one word in ten, but they used the word 'exponential' a few times. I know that's a snazzy word, when you're talking about more power.”

“Neat!” she said, crinkling her nose with a smile. “Exawatts huh? That word gives me a bad case of the butterflies. Janis, lets you and me go math around and talk about beam weapons. Captain, what do you think... is calling it an Archaea-class beam weapon too pretentious of an upgrade from nova-class?” Her face was straight as the day is long aboard this ship, though what she was casually discussing was adorably insane.

“Absolutely not, Shorty. Heck, that sounds like a great name to me.” He smiled proudly. “But... I want my guns first, before we come out of slipspace, before we play with fusion.”

“Absolutely Captain. I have completed the loading rails and just need to work on calibration. Can I have Yak for a few moments?”

“Sure thing Shorty, but be gentle. Yak is needed to stand watch here soon, and I can't have him all worn out. Kids, remember, work fast here. Speed is our mission, and as much as I want these guns operational, we desperately need that tokamak tuned.”

“Aye sir”, she said brightly, smiling up at me. As we kicked along the companionway aft to the gun deck, he continued on comms.

“Gene, Shorty and Yak are headed aft to go great guns on the guns, are you and Janis ready for the tokamak? I don't want to be poking along for the next 6 weeks to Solis. I want someone to ask me if we're there yet, so I can tell them yes.”

“As ready as we're ever going to be, Dak, the math looks good sir. Janis has this dialed.”

Jane and I stopped in the machine shop, and she loaded me up with tools and other supplies. Moving fast, she kicked for the ring ladder and I had to work to keep up. 

“What sort of work are we looking at here Jane?” I asked as we pulled up to the turret compartment.

“Oh, it'll be fun Yak. What I need, is someone to sit in the turret controls here and watch the scopes as I make adjustments to the housing and armatures.”

As she spoke, she was clipping lanyards to a number of tools, until the turret compartment looked like it was full of noodles. I could barely get my shoulders through the access hatch in this tiny compartment, but I curled up and tried to stay out of the way and think small. Seeing Jane moving around with no constrictions really jarred my sense of perspective, but I'm pretty used to the feeling – nothing is ever my size.

“Okay Yak, I'm headed up – just sit tight here at the controls, and watch the screens. We're going to zero this for 1000 meters and try to work up to 50,000 - though that may be pretty tricky.”

“Is this adjustable, Jane?” I was trying to fit into the couch for the controls, but the headrest was hitting me in the middle of my back.

“Whoops, sorry Yak, I had it adjusted for me. Just pull out on the lever on the side and it will unlock. It should fit you, though it might be a tight fit.”

I got the couch extended and it ended up being pretty comfortable, not too bad at all. “Okay Jane, I am ready. So you want me to range this for 1000 meters?”

“Yep”, she said down from the access hatch. “Just change the value on the screen, at the bottom right”

The scope was pretty basic, with standard cross-hairs as one would expect, a range set at the bottom right corner, a range to target at bottom left that was showing 'out of range' and what appeared to be a target list swipe-in that looked like it used to work with the original target software. Pretty basic stuff, even for me.

“Okay Jane, we're set at 1000 meters.”

“Great, thanks. Okay, we're going to work first on azimuth. To the right of the center reticule, there should be a number, either positive or negative – we want that number to be at zero for this range.”

“I see it Jane, it's currently at 1.3421, and rising”

“Thanks Yak, ok, I am going the other way... is it dropping?”

“It is, Jane... pretty slowly though.”

“Yeah, it's a pretty micro adjuster, though not as fine as the higher ranges! This is going to take a while, just give me a shout when it reaches zero”

I watched the numbers drop slowly and called out when they zeroed out. She had to go back and forth a bit to dial it in precisely, and then we started going up the ranges one click at a time. I couldn't say I had fun, but it was not really a very challenging detail. I am skilled at sitting, though I don't get as much opportunity to do it as I would like.

“Yak, can you set the range higher than 50 clicks?”

“No Jane, not that I can see... is there something I am missing?”

“No... I was just hoping we could dial these in further. I am also not very happy with the precision of the old scopes...” she trailed off, muttering something I couldn't hear from down in the turret compartment.

“Yak, Janis can't hear me up here, can you get her on comms for me?”

"Sure thing Jane, hold please”, I said with a laugh, channeling a patch-cable operator. The joke would probably have been lost on everyone but Gene. He probably has spare patch cables in a box somewhere, just in case they're ever needed .