Two days later
 
I finished the quantum transponder. The communication PC was also basically done, as I had many components ready in storage—especially the really good processor that I wouldn’t even be able to make with the best nozzle I have for the 3D printer.
 
This will put me well past the minimum specs for a PC like this. I still have some components to build that are a lot better than the current communications array, which should allow for a much better connection from further away. I can understand the principles they work on, but these designs truly are ahead of Earth technology.
 
They will still not fix the problem of distance lag, but it felt good to have a more robust communications array than I currently had. The real trouble is the programs.
 
The quantum net isn’t as generous as I first hoped. The problem is that a lot of the information on the programming isn’t available to just be viewed—you need to purchase it, but the purchase requires you to do so in one of the real-life locations of those who sell it.
 
So, I was a little bit fucked.
 
Fortunately, I had all the specs on what those programs needed to do. So, it was time to start programming. Some of the programs I can just modify from the ones I already have. For some, I think I can borrow code from games, like for the docking visual guide.
 
It will be a somewhat fun project, but all of this will take time—quite a lot of it.
 
Three days later
 
“Master, I am worried. I am not closer to finding our location, and I have gone a lot deeper than just some of the recommended home pages. I also think that this universe might be a lot more dangerous than that homepage suggests.”
 
I was going to reprimand her, but I heard her tone, and she seemed really troubled.
 
“Put the information on the screen and explain your worries.”
 
“First, I did find a few pages that offered services to locate you, but all of them needed mana credits, and for that, you needed to already be in contact with civilization. It doesn’t make sense to me at all. Even going through the entire lists of every galaxy name in the Galaxy Net hasn’t done anything—just a waste of time.”
 
“I can understand your frustration. From the looks of it, you truly have gone through everything. So we need to tackle this from a different angle. You mentioned a bit ago that you started to find chat rooms. Have you found any related to star charting?”
 
“Quite a lot of them, but they’re no help. I even tried to ask a question in some of them, but they immediately tried to connect to my PC and continued to do so every time I tried to get access again. It’s annoying.”
 
“That sounds troublesome indeed. Give me a list of all the chat rooms and a bit of description of what goes on in there.”
 
“Acknowledged.”
 
There were a little over 300 chat rooms she had discovered about charting and overall interest groups on mapping. I thought that I might have a way of fixing our problem, but I needed a very specific chat room for that.
 
“Lola, how’s the new PC holding up?”
 
“It still crashes, but only once has it done so before the cube has recharged, so basically, I have had constant uptime.”
 
“That’s good. Now tell me more about this other trouble you seem to think we are in.”
 
“Well, it’s just that the homepage seemed to paint a nice picture—that yes, there are conflicts, but most of the time, everything is civilized.”
 
“Mhm.”
 
“Well, it’s actually horrible, especially in some places. For example, it stated how many nations there were and how much space they covered, but if you put all those nations together, I’m pretty sure pirates in this universe hold more space than they do.”
 
That made me stop for a moment.
 
“The only time pirates are truly dealt with is if they break the universal law. Otherwise, if nations attack or other pirates, they just flee to another place and set up there.”
 
“Then there was something that wasn’t mentioned about portals.”Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
 
“If they go too long without being cleared out and closed, everything inside can come outside. Some parts of galaxies are just filled with space monsters that consume everything around them. Many planets are simply eaten of their life, and anything resembling civilizations are consumed.”
 
“Those monsters don’t even trigger the universal laws. Can you believe that?”
 
“Wait, so defenseless civilizations are just left to be eaten?” I asked in a bit of a shock.
 
“Some might try to help, but mostly because hunting space monsters is profitable. There are entire planets that are overrun by monsters. And if all this wasn’t bad enough, civilization does what it has always done best—spread suffering. There are constant wars of extermination. As long as they don’t touch pre-FTL solar systems, there would be no collective help in stopping anyone.”
 
“Even slavery is quite common, especially in pirate space. It’s an awful and terrifying universe. Then there’s the way everyone fights. Ships are terrifying, but so are people. Everything is difficult to get proper information on, as there’s a lot of conflicting data. But the battlefields of the universe are horrifying.”
 
It seems her rant finally came to an end, but I think she also needed that.
 
“In all honesty, Lola, I expected nothing less. It’s good that we know so we can prepare. Unfortunately, we didn’t know what was out here, otherwise, I would have built a lot more weapons. But I think I found a chat room that might work.”
 
I headed toward my own quantum computer, then started it up.
 
“Lola, display to me a pathway to get to the chat room I’ve marked ‘Test 1.’ And you head there as well.”
 
“Acknowledged.”
 
It was like descending into someplace deep, having to go through so many different pages, always going deeper and deeper before we finally reached the right chat room.
 
These weren’t the chat rooms I was used to—there was no auto-updating. You needed to hit refresh and see who had written. On one page, there were only 40 comments maximum before you needed to hit the next page. Everything was very archaic.
 
“Now, Lola, I want you to generate a fixed position a bit away from here, like a light-year toward the galaxy center. The surrounding 400 stars or their locations from that position and their orbital paths—we should have that information, do we not?”
 
“Yes, I have that information.”
 
“Good. Then the distance from the edge of the galaxy from, let's say, eight points, and the distance from the center of the galaxy. Add a few other points like that from some notable features that look beautiful or odd. Also, the speed and the path of the side dimension current.”
 
“Acknowledged. This will take some time.”
 
Until she was finished, I continued to surf this chat room. It seemed to be filled with just hobbyists talking about star charts and mapping. They were interested in interesting areas, and they shared locations quite often. Hopefully, this will work.
 
It took Lola about 12 minutes to finish calculating everything and then display what I needed to write down. I understood at least the letters of this language now, which made things easier, and I could say a few phrases, but I still blindly followed what I needed to write.
 
“Now, let’s add to the end of this: ‘Where am I’ with a smiley face and a question mark. Let’s see if they bite.”
 
“Acknowledged. And clever.”
 
After I typed it out, I was quite close to the character limit, which wasn’t displayed, but if you went over it—well, it just crashed. I pressed enter and refreshed to see my comment showing up. The very next moment, my PC shut down as probably multiple people tried to find out who I was.
 
Lola displayed what she was seeing.
 
“Who was that?”
 
“No idea, but they're disconnected now. Even if they reconnect, I’ll try to trace them again, which would mean they will never get back here again. That’s been happening more and more. I think we need to change location.”
 
“Agreed.”
 
“Agreed.”
 
“If they want to know their location, they should just pay for it.”
 
“But where do you think that location is? There are a few curious landmarks. It shouldn’t be too hard.”
 
“Well, you can eliminate quite a lot of galaxies as this one is a spiral. The speed and the path of the current are also something that should eliminate quite a lot of places.”
 
“Wait, are we really doing this?”
 
“I already have my supercomputer eliminating galaxies that don’t fit.” Followed by a grinning smile emoji.
 
“It seems like an interesting challenge.”
 
None of the comments had names, but I did notice that there was a strange symbol every so often, and each one of them only had a particular kind. I guess that’s how they recognized each other, and probably why I was kicked immediately.
 
Lola continued to observe, and I went back to programming, although my mind wasn’t really in it.
 
Damn, you really can’t be confident in assumptions in space. I had been so sure it was empty that I only prepared enough to get out of that solar system, and I even underestimated them. Only thanks to my acceleration was I able to get away. What I needed was a lot of time in some shipyard so I could make this ship at least somewhat viable.
 
There was also the trouble of the shielding. As the metal armor was turning radioactive, it was constantly doing its work of keeping everything out. It was a brilliant design that even had combat applications.
 
It would keep me safe from weapons that caused enough of some type of radiation to kill anything inside that was biological—and I guess even electronic. No EMP was going to get through that.
 
Even if a nuke exploded, but did not directly hit, I should be safe, as in space there wasn’t a shockwave that could damage me in a physical way. The problem was that the more radiation there was, the more heat the shielding generated, and if it got past a certain temperature, it would start to lose effectiveness and melt.
 
So while I should be able to survive a nuke exploding somewhere close by, it would also depend on how big that nuke was and what it was designed to do. The problem was that the current shielding was not meant to be military-grade. It was close to it, but I wanted to save on weight because I was certain they weren’t going to waste nuclear-tipped warheads on my little self.
 
At least it seems like proper fission materials are expensive, and while they get cheaper when you get to a certain warhead size—since you can use less costly materials—you just need a lot more.
 
Those would probably not be able to accelerate as fast, and even those would be expensive to build. And why would you use them on a ship like mine? Because you would want to capture it, not vaporize it.
 
The problem still remained that the shielding was heating up, and while my heat exchangers could handle it easily, there was another issue.
 
Another brilliant design someone came up with. The heat exchangers use the waste heat a spaceship generates and turns it into electricity. It was extremely efficient and meant no outside radiators were needed to keep the ship from cooking itself.
 
The problem was you couldn't use those heat exchangers directly on the shielding. Arcs of electricity would not be good for it.
 
So, you needed to transfer the heat they were generating a bit away from the shielding, and then you could use the heat exchanger. The problem was that connection. It wasn’t as efficient in heat transfer as I wanted it to be, and currently, we were no longer at optimal heat and were slowly climbing ever higher.
 
We would still have months here if we needed to, but I couldn’t stay here for years—that was certain. Unless I made the transfer of heat more efficient.
 
My head turned towards the nanomachines. On their own, they wouldn't help much, but if you made them into the correct clusters, they could be made to do practically anything. It would just take a lot of them, and they were expensive to make.
 
It seems like the nanotech companies didn’t have proper imagination. Even Nano Tree didn’t think of using them like clusters, only focusing on the individual nanomachine, making it the best it could be.
 
That is also important—very important—if you use them inside your body. You couldn’t really do anything with clusters there, although some energy generation, perhaps, but that’s a different idea.
 
Basically, they were all too short-sighted to see the real value of these nanomachines, especially as things that could change one form of energy into another. They seemed quite brilliant at that, and that I can use in many applications.
 
For the next while, I just ran through different ideas and sketched out a few of them that I thought were especially interesting and useful.
 
“They finally found the correct location. We now know the designation of this galaxy, and the translator will now show it as Milky Way. I will start gathering information about our immediate surroundings and then working outwards.”
 
“Excellent. Keep me informed.”