1.2.3. Capsule
Richard liked the twitching of his prisoner under the latex sheeting. She seemed to like the vibrator. He was sure that she had just reached her first orgasm and was already on her way to her second. It took him some effort, but he took his eyes off her and turned to the small cube of Selene's skull.
The cube with an edge length of one centimeter seemed to be a package made of some kind of plastic. The cube was almost entirely black, but had seven small white dots distributed irregularly on its surface. He tried to see a pattern in the dots, but there was none.
Finally he found a lid on one side without a dot, which he could open with tweezers. Who had put that thing in her? Inside, he found a small computer chip, some differently coloured tablets and a white granular powder. Looked a little like fine salt, but seemed to be biological. He first packed the tablets and the powder and decided to start with the computer chip.
The chip looked a bit like a shortened version of a micro-SD card. Only the contacts were gold-plated. He connected it to his computer and tried to find out what kind of data was on the chip. At first his computer didn't react to the small chip at all, but a few moments later his screen went black.
Was there a virus on it? Fortunately, he hadn't connected it to a computer with important data, but to one that had no connection to the outside world. Standard routine, which he also used if he took a hard disk with trade secrets from one of his competitors.
He stared at the black screen for a few seconds and wanted to stop the attempt when writing appeared on it.
"Hello, Richard.
Congratulations on taking possession of Selene.
The chip contains instructions on how to control
Selene and some other useful information.
Please handle Selene with care.
There's no way to exchange her if she's damaged."
Richard was confused. How did the chip know his name? And how did it manage to control the computer? And most importantly, what was the chip doing in Selene? Very odd. The writing stopped for a few seconds and gave way to a window with various files and subfolders.
He found her genes in a file. A folder with other genetic data, but it wasn't hers. And a folder with technical drawings. He found simple constructions, like the one of a jet engine, but also the instructions for the construction of powerful lasers that could be used as a weapon. And an instruction manual for building a deuterium-based fusion reactor.
There were thousands of folders with instructions for building very different things. Some of the technologies were hopelessly outdated, others like the fusion reactor or the quantum computer had been conceivable but were still decades away from realization. He skimmed over which technologies had already been developed and considered when they had been developed.
The oldest thing he could find was the Haber-Bosch process, which could be used to fix atmospheric nitrogen and process it into fertilizer or explosives. 1908, if he could remember correctly. What was a hundred and twenty-five years old technology doing in this collection?
He skimmed the construction manual for the fusion reactor. Supposedly, it worked so it wouldn't produce radioactive waste. And it would not simply produce heat which would then be used to generate electricity with a generator, but would generate the electricity directly. With the currently proposed design, the generator had as much in common as a steam engine with a fuel cell. Of course it also needed cooling, but it was much more compact than power plants of comparable capacity. The small version with one gigawatt of electrical power was only ten meters in size, the version with a hundred gigawatts was thirty.
If that really worked, it would make him damn rich. He could make billions. He looked at the list of materials and estimated the cost. The small reactor would cost about one billion, the big one about fifty billion. Pretty expensive, but still a good deal. The investment costs would be slightly lower than for combustion power plants, and the fuel costs would be practically zero. For practical purposes, deuterium was available in seawater in almost inexhaustible quantities. But before he devoted himself to getting richer, he looked at the files on Selene.
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