The animation showed a piece of something streak through the murmuration of vessels. Each vessel in its path adroitly moved out of the way to let it pass through.
“But say we don’t spot it in time.”
Another chunk of space grit passed through. The first two vessels dodged, but the grit hit the third piece, destroying it instantly and sending pieces of crap flying. The vessels dodged as well as they could, but the impacts triggered a chain reaction leading to the destruction of three more vessels.
“Boom, boom, boom, that’s really bad, right? We’ve just lost three vessels, and the destruction of one led to ripples of destruction. But watch.”
Small drones, launched from the other vessels, dragged tiny threads that snared fragments of the ruined vessels. The vessels towards the rear fanned out and spread a sticky web between them. The vessels near the front fanned out and provided thrust for the group. Chunks of former vessels got caught in the web and reeled in.
“It might take a while, but I’ve found, in simulations, I can recapture over ninety-nine percent of the solid matter lost in the destruction of the vessels, and even most of the nitrogen gas I’ve been carrying with me as reaction mass, as it tends to liquify in open space and I can slurp it up.”
The animation showed the vessel swarm, whole again, hauling arse through the cosmic void, a faint glittering trail of debris in our wake.
“Once the damage is repaired, I’d look into how the sensors missed it and how to reduce the chance of a future occurrence.
“Any lessons learned I’d share with my engineering teams back here on Earth,” I lied.
“Terrific. The benefits flow to all of humanity.”
“That they do, Kate, that they do.” I crossed my fingers behind my back; a commonly accepted way to annul veracity. The portal vanished in a shimmer of tinfoil confetti.
Dr Ellison stood. The stagehands removed her couch.
It was my cue to leave. I stood, waved to the audience, thanked Dr Ellison for the opportunity, then dissolved along with my fancy Finnish chair, in an approximation of a Star Trek Original Series transporter effect, with sound.
Dr Ellison beamed and applauded. The audience clapped.
The hardware engineering team in Europe were having conniptions about nitrogen, how much I’d need, and where I’d get it. They were on a call with Dr Lakshmi Naidoo, appearing from Mumbai.
Dr Olaf Gruen, from CERN in Switzerland, was speaking. “Nitrogen leaks, and in space it will leak through anything given time.”
“Do we have a plan for how the vessel will replenish itself? Because it’s going to have to be able to,” said Dr Naidoo.
“Hello, Karen Svenson here, alzo from CERN but upstairs haha. You can hear me okay?”
Everyone on the call nodded.
“Look, okay, if ze vessel vill be capable enough zat it can construct itself, repair itzelf, and make copies of itzelf zen surely harvezting nitrogen vill be eee-zeee right?”
Dr Naidoo looked like she was about to say something then Ms. Svenson continued. “Look, ja. I accept zere are a million unt vun prek-tikal detailz.” She waved a hand about. “How do ve power all zis herstellung, you know, manufekturing, indeed how ze vezel powers itzelf hass not been de-zided. Ve azzume zolar-zails vill be deployed to hah-nezz zolar enerchy ven in-zystem but ze vezel vill need to ztore power, unt chenerate power, for maybe vun hundred years.”
Ms. Svenson brought up a crude animation and narrated as little bleep bleep sounds indicated that my sensors had identified a target moon, with a nitrogen-rich atmosphere, and ice deposits. The moon blinked a few times inside a gamer’s target grid, then the view zoomed into an abstract schematic depicting me analysing the data. Huzzah! The screen flashed up the words ‘Bestätigtes Vorhandensein und Zugänglichkeit von Stickstoff1’ in green.
Cut to the fabricators attached to my side, tiny articulated fingers knitting giant bendy straws like a team of tiny trapdoor spiders spinning a web. The raw materials for the straws are harvested from the plating on my hull and woven into a directed graph of microscopic capillaries. The animation cuts to a swarm of drones flying down to the surface. A school of large flat drones is manufactured by cannibalising my hull and sent towards the planet. They serve as anchor points, trailing their straws into the atmosphere and drawing out the nitrogen and other elements via osmosis as they are dragged through the upper layer. The gas is pumped into a large balloon that is hauled by the anchor drone as it skips off the atmosphere back into space, back to the vessel. I’ve rehearsed scenarios like this so I can relate to what’s happening.
The visual then cuts to the surface where drones have reconfigured themselves into a fleet of digging, drilling, and delivery drones that efficiently extract tonnes of some arcane substance. They imply it’s nitrogen but really, as I looked deeper into the model generating the animation, it was nothing. Just wrapping on a coarse grid with texture and shadow mapping. It’s a cheap trick.
The mining drones assemble themselves into a simple chemical rocket and the point of view pulls back as it blasts off back into space; cut to the vessel's waiting arms. Cut to the big balloons of nitrogen gas now being pumped via a medusa’s thicket of self-assembled hoses into storage sacs below the hull. Nitrogen, it’s my suet.
“Looks fancy,” said Dr Naidoo.
She’s seen what I saw, and she didn’t have access to the animators’ models like I did. Dr Naidoo’s bullshit detectors locked onto the same notion I had. There’s no reality under what Svenson is showing, only some kinematics to make it look realistic. There are no details. We were still figuring out how I’d actually do a lot of this.
The demo looked persuasive though; it was put together by a marketing team. It aligned with my training. It looked like something I could do. It looked like something I’ve always been able to do.