Forging Ahead (GURPS Interstellar Wars/Celestial Forge)

[TroyX]

I didn't think the stranding was a bad move, and was looking forward to seeing how Sophia handled it, but if you felt like you couldn't make it work after all, then you did what you had to do. I still like seeing more of how she interacts with the Confederation too, so no complaints here either way

 

[Faralis]

Ouch, I just read Blade4 info on the enemy ( you should have spoiled that, but well ).

That was a tough thing to write, IMHO, I did not dislike the deleted chapter, but I can see how that could be difficult to continue the plot, without a veritable ass pull from the Celestial Forge...

 

[Vrenze]

SO I guess the question becomes where is the primary struggle, is it internal or external. Internal sounds like a good idea since its already foreshadowed, she wanted to live a normal life but got told effectively by God that war was coming and if she didn't do anything her entire reality would be destroyed. She's been shown some crazy things and had to make a tough decision about a relatively unstoppable "I Win but at what cost" button that was a struggle for her to put down and destroy. Now, the pressure is off, God has said "good enough" with that comes an implicit "now rest" and now all the pressure she's had to deal with and ignore is gone, she's weightless and rudderless. Unfortunately she's also in a position where everyone will want to use her to make the Next Big Thing because she is effectively a supercomputer with natural language capability with her perfect memory, wide ranging education, and Collation ability "Surely if we just feed her more and point her in the right direction...". So it becomes does she want to do more, should she do more, does she NEED to do more and for who? Why? Unfortunately this way will inevitably lie madness with many coming out of lurking to cry and hew "why isn't she doing more?! I don't want to read angst!"

 

[Blade4]

Ouch, I just read Blade4 info on the enemy ( you should have spoiled that, but well ).

That was a tough thing to write, IMHO, I did not dislike the deleted chapter, but I can see how that could be difficult to continue the plot, without a veritable ass pull from the Celestial Forge...

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Yeah i am a fucktard. That part now in spoiler. Not that it matters that much now...

 

[Knaka]

Again, I'd like to thank you for writing this cliff.

While I'm here, can I suggest that if you still have a copy of it, that you should post the deleted chapter 8 as a non-canon branching path or something like that. While I am one of the readers that disliked the sudden change in the story, I am also a reader that likes to let their mind wander on what-ifs. Even if it won't be canon to this story, I still like your writing and enjoy imagining different ways stories could go.

I'm not sure if QQ has an apocrypha option like SV, but if not you can just put it in something like extras.

I appreciate reading stories like this and hope that you get good inspiration for writing.

 

[cliffc999]

Sadly, I did not keep a copy of it. Sorry.

 

[Gregory Crey]

Sad to hear, you obviously put a lot of effort into that chapter, I am sorry it didn't work out.

I wish you luck with the rewrite!

 

[Kahalah]

good luck with the rewrite cliff. Maybe later on that Genocidal familial slaughtering asshole might show interest in Humanity when they advance at a hyper advanced way. It could make him assume a data cashe or one of his children left something behind? just an idea for later on.

 

[MissileTeatime]

Sadly, I did not keep a copy of it. Sorry.

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You deleted the post content, and didn't just remove the threadmark? Ooh, ouch.

 

[LZB1285]

Sadly, I did not keep a copy of it. Sorry.

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If you talk to the staff a copy might be recoverable from the database backup. IIRC QQ's backend uses a ?SQL? database which doesn't like deleting entries so just tags them as not showing. So unless you edited the contents of the chapter it might still be there.

Up to you.

 

[Leafy503]

In hindsight, the sudden shift at the end of chapter 8 was a stupid idea. Nothing like realizing that you hadn't spotted a major plot hole in your intended future plot until after you already started its first act. *le sigh*

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I'm sure you can come up with other obstacles for our protag to come against. Maybe something with the K'kree or the Vargr?

So I'm taking chapter 8 down, and will repost a revised chapter 8 at a later date. The Abductor now vanishes back into the land of non-canon, to maybe be hauled out later and maybe not. We'll see.

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That's fine. I'm sure most readers would be fine with a couple chapters of teching up before any ancient shenanigans,

 

[012345]

Okay, having thought it over, the idea that I'd thought I had working fell apart on me - repeatedly - while I was actually trying to write it. In hindsight, the sudden shift at the end of chapter 8 was a stupid idea. Nothing like realizing that you hadn't spotted a major plot hole in your intended future plot until after you already started its first act. *le sigh*

And while I really don't like retconning myself, I like being a fucking idiot who wrote himself into a corner even less.

So I'm taking chapter 8 down, and will repost a revised chapter 8 at a later date. The Abductor now vanishes back into the land of non-canon, to maybe be hauled out later and maybe not. We'll see.

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Will you be also fixing your explanation of HPG's? Plus also remember there isnt actualy any diffrences between class of HPG's. All of those cycle at the same rate and they do it much faster than Is think they are. Its just Comstar lieing to drive up prices.

 

[Waste]

I'm glad it's getting revised. I wasn't too happy with chapter 8 either. It's like in video games when you're fighting a boss character and he ass pulls an escape in a cutscene that you can't do anything to stop AFTER you beat him. A little more foreshadowing would have helped it seem more consistent. Blindsiding your protag is good, but blindsiding the reader usually isn't. Unless it's some kind of twist. Like what the reader thinks is happening actually has more subtle background to it, or it's actually just a deception.

 

[ShaperV]

The thing is you said this fic is about exploring empire building right? So why are you pushing a plot line that prevent empire building? A empire is more than one person. Even one people frankly. Sophia is a catalyst and critical one but she does not have to stay at the center of the story as the plot moves on and the changes she makes percolate. You have blown the setting wide open so why not extrapolate and say tell a story of the Confed trying to rapidly expand and build even as the Vilani slowly wake up to the fact that the Terrans have nuked the library they live by?

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I had a similar thought. I mean, I'm certainly not going to complain if cliffc999 wants to turn this into an adventure story. He's pretty good at those, and I'm sure it would be interesting. But it's already been noted that Traveler is not the kind of setting where it makes sense for a researcher or leader to be engaged in a lot of personal adventures. So if this is supposed to turn into an empire building story there's a need for at least some plot arcs to center around something other than the heroic shennanigans you'd normally expect in an adventure story.

Since Sophia is a scientists my first thought was to focus more on the process of her research, and the work that goes into making things happen, instead of just glossing over the details. I could easily imagine a story where developing the FTL com was an entire plot arc, introducing a bunch of character who work at the skunkworks and detailing their struggles to bring this crazy new tech to fruition. But alas, the Celestial Forge is probably too powerful for that. It's hard to work up any tension around the question of whether Sophia succeeds at any given project when her cheat power is handing out guaranteed success, after all.

The other option I can see would be to focus more on the organizational issues, where Sophia doesn't have any massive cheats doing the work for her. Introduce enough problems and poor decisions on the part of the government that Sophia feels she can't just stay in the lab and leave all the big decisions to the 'experts'. Then there could be plot arcs built around her trying to collect friends and allies, learn how the system works, lobby for policies she believes in and generally working to carve out some ability to act independently. But that would require having a lot of chapters that are about Sophia socializing, playing office politics and trying to work the system, rather than going out someplace she might get shot at

 

[cliffc999]

To all the people who have graciously offered me copies of my deleted chapter 8 first draft, thank you, but I would rather it stay deleted. If I remotely thought it was working and worth reading I wouldn't have taken it down.

 

[Mgunh1]

Only very tangentially related, but why did nobody tell me Industrious existed before today?

Man, so much for my dropping out and trying again with an Inspired Inventor fic. I would have to bring my A-game to even begin to match this, and my fickle muse means that I'm quite often writing with my B-game. My A-game only comes out under the right phases of the moon or some shit.

BTW, the simple brilliant device of slowing the charge rate down to 1/month fixed a whole ton of shit that I had trouble with re: Inspired Inventor in the past. Well done, Slayer Anderson.

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Well, what if you sort of blend Celestial Forge's rules with Inspired Inventor's?

Basically, you get one charge per X arbitrary time period, where one charge is worth the minimum CP value (50).
You only roll on the forge if you spend your charges. The more charges spent the better the results. But it is still random, so you don't really know what you'll get, only that it will be worth the amount you spent. Spend 600cp, get 600cp worth of perks. Might get a 600cp perk, might get 6 100cp perks.

Becomes a sort of economics management mixed with gatcha. Waiting means you'll get better/more stuff later, but you might need something now and there's no guarantee of actually rolling anything good.

Eh. Its an idea. Nothing more.

 

[Leafy503]

But it is still random, so you don't really know what you'll get, only that it will be worth the amount you spent. Spend 600cp, get 600cp worth of perks. Might get a 600cp perk, might get 6 100cp perks.

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The randomness was the problem in the first place. A roll too OP might destroy the pacing. Like it almost did with cliffc999 last Celestial Forge fic.

 

[ryune]

The randomness was the problem in the first place. A roll too OP might destroy the pacing. Like it almost did with cliffc999 last Celestial Forge fic.

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The randomness actually helped with the story itself I think. It's one of the things that helps stir up ideas. It's also something that needs constant supervision and curating, sure, but it also helps a lot in defining the... personality of a particular person's forge, for lack of a better term.

I think this might have been part of why the other forge fic was so successful. The MC there needed his supporting cast and they played off of each other really well because he couldn't just pick up something from the forge for a given problem or pick up things that were as omnidiciplinarian as Well Researched on his own initiative.

I think that might be a bit of a sticking point for myself on this fic now that I've sitting down and thinking about it. It feels like Sophia has been... not railroaded but more like lead around by the nose by the forge. One of the very first things that it did was give her a quest to "save the world as she knows it" and that's been her driving force since pretty much day one. As a result... we don;t really know much in the way of her motivations. Oh, we know that she's very driven... when she has a quest to save everyone she knows. We know she's a bit nerdy. But we really don't know that much about her that we really should have known after 3 years in her head. and it feels like Sophia is kind of lost on that front too after spending 3 years with that quest living rent free in her head.

 

[Leafy503]

The randomness actually helped with the story itself I think. It's one of the things that helps stir up ideas. It's also something that needs constant supervision and curating, sure, but it also helps a lot in defining the... personality of a particular person's forge, for lack of a better term.

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A Inspired Inventor or Tinker of Fiction would be much easier to steer the story as tech wanks go anyway. Celestial Forge fic tend to either die young or get muddled up in a bunch of heavy exposition.

 

[cliffc999]

A Inspired Inventor or Tinker of Fiction would be much easier to steer the story as tech wanks go anyway. Celestial Forge fic tend to either die young or get muddled up in a bunch of heavy exposition.

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Yeah, I took a few days off for the holidays but I have been thinking about it, and I've been starting to come to the conclusion that you guys are correct. Well, that's why I said that this was my second experiment at working with the Celestial Forge. Not all experiments suceed, and right now I'm starting to conclude that even if other authors can make it work for them, I don't 'click' at making it work for me. "Light of the Forge" was really me getting lucky, in hindsight.

I'll still see about trying to get this story to some kind of conclusion before I consider trying to do something else.

 

[ryune]

Yeah, I took a few days off for the holidays but I have been thinking about it, and I've been starting to come to the conclusion that you guys are correct. Well, that's why I said that this was my second experiment at working with the Celestial Forge. Not all experiments suceed, and right now I'm starting to conclude that even if other authors can make it work for them, I don't 'click' at making it work for me. "Light of the Forge" was really me getting lucky, in hindsight.

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I think part of it was that you were experimenting on two different tracks. The first was the obvious one in using the forge but the other was trying to do an empire builder. And I honestly think it was proceeding fairly decently apace until the last chapter honestly... on the forge side of things.

Empire building? Not so much. Until the buy of the IS tech base she was running into some pretty decent challenges with interpersonal issues that were genuinely interesting and the character interactions really came through but... she didn't tend to build lasting relationships. And those relationships that she did build were barely referenced later on. She wasn't building a power base of characters that she could go to for favors and do them in turn and she didn't need to because of the genius patrol. She wasn't fighting against her own personal Robert Kinsey for funding, she wasn't butting heads with a Carter or Mckay. Just "welp, here you go! FTL comms ahead of schedule and under budget!"

Just to be clear though, I actually liked the direction it was going up until the jump cut. Having an entire arc dedicated to Sophia trying to figure out "what now?" without impending doom hovering over her head would be really interesting! Maybe have her get roofied and kidnapped by a human trafficking ring or get caught up in some other personal scale drama for a bit!

EDIT: I think that is really missing is an "Inciting Incident" for Sophia to build that power base. Incompetence on the part of superiors, corruption and nepotism, base level sexism or just an "I'm going to shown them all" power trip. Almost all of it was obviated by the GP just basically handing Sophia all the resources in the world because she made a super battery.

 

[Vrenze]

Incompetence on the part of superiors, corruption and nepotism, base level sexism or just an "I'm going to shown them all" power trip.

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Not sure something as relatively petty as "Base level sexism" is a good enough reason to create a breakaway polity when you know a major galactic conflict is about to kickoff.

As far as combining CF and II: an idea that admittedly leans more II than CF would be that the MC would get X charges in a period, or as effectively quest rewards, sans acknowledgement or not as you please. Those charges are used in either general knowledge/skills and the CF side could be something like randomly rolled, pre-selected author choice, or quest rewarded (again sans ack or no). CF things would either only give a piece of tech or require II charges to buy knowledge from what the perk would give. To perform some game like balance lets say the MC gets Starcraft Terran tech from CF with a modifier of 0/10. Those charges could be used to get blueprints, and lets say that an SCV, basically a fancy dock loader with tools, costs 6 total charges because it is fancy and has a lot of moving parts. Maybe their gauss guns are 3 cost, leaving 1 charge, they could start another tech but unless it is deemed super simple or they grab general knowledge from the setting they could not complete it...until it gets rerolled. Now I also mentioned the possibility of getting whole items, lets take the Terran rifle for example, it costs 3 to get the blueprint for it but if they opted to get the item whole hog, like say there's a life threatening event they need a gun NOW not how to make it, well then the item costs 6+ for the rifle and an extra magazine of ammo. But that is entirely based on if the author wants to hand out physical items at all.

With this, it limits what CF can do while still allowing for a character that doesn't know every fandom ever to still get neat things from different places. Basically a jumpchain protag that doesn't need to have been to that world to be able to whip up/out something from somewhere else.

 

[cliffc999]

Not sure something as relatively petty as "Base level sexism" is a good enough reason to create a breakaway polity when you know a major galactic conflict is about to kickoff.

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It's also the 22nd century in an interstellar future where mankind is just a few percent south of the Starship Troopers level of total militarization because they're outnumbered over a thousand to one by an interstellar empire that's attacked them multiple times and once orbitally nuked the Earth.

At this point they're not going to do anything that cuts the available manpower pool in half for no good reason.

 

[ryune]

Not sure something as relatively petty as "Base level sexism" is a good enough reason to create a breakaway polity when you know a major galactic conflict is about to kickoff.

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I was more referencing anything that would be a detriment due to her gender. Something on the order of a superior trying to use their position to get her to do favors for the things they could provide or something to that effect but I take your point. I was just listing off things that I could see being reasons for her to want to start on her own "clique" or in group that could later be leveraged... even if they were overly petty in practice, or even if the motivation was overly petty on her side of the equation for an imagined slight.

 

[Blade4]

Yeah, I took a few days off for the holidays but I have been thinking about it, and I've been starting to come to the conclusion that you guys are correct.

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I think you are selling yourself a bit short. You were doing good until you swerved to make Sophia go into a adventure story. Give it more time and perhaps try several paths and see what happened.

 

[ShaperV]

Yeah, I took a few days off for the holidays but I have been thinking about it, and I've been starting to come to the conclusion that you guys are correct. Well, that's why I said that this was my second experiment at working with the Celestial Forge. Not all experiments suceed, and right now I'm starting to conclude that even if other authors can make it work for them, I don't 'click' at making it work for me. "Light of the Forge" was really me getting lucky, in hindsight.

Click to shrink...

I think Light of the Forge got a big boost from the fact that the MC was living in a chaotic environment full of random danger and adventure. When your protagonist and his group are basically an adventuring party who do a little science on the side, that makes it a lot easier to write their adventures. Instead of showing the inventing process, and trying to make it interesting, you could always gloss over it and write the party using the results in a fight. But it's notable that the story bogged down on the transition from 'wandering adventuring party' to 'science guy in the lab saves everyone'.

 

[cliffc999]

Yeah, sorry. At least this time it's no one's fault except mine. I decided to try an experiment of writing outside my usual comfort zone, and I combined that with my usual plan of trying to wing it re: plot, and doing both at once was overly ambitious to say the least.

So after I stalled on that I listened to the excellent suggestions that were being made after I pulled the failed chapter 8, and tried to implement them, but when I spent the past couple of days getting zero inspiration on so much as 'designing a regular NPC for Sophia to play off of' (it was going to be her new bodyguard, because she was getting to where a security detail for their new golden goose was a thing)... well, when you can't touch the slightest bit of inspiration for so much as creating a sidekick, that's when you know your muse is giving up.

Fuck it, I really want to make a tech-wank fic actually work sometime given that this is my third failed attempt after "A Ghost of a Chance" and "The Light of the Forge", but I am going to have to figure out how the hell I do that before I actually do that. And given that I am a classic seat-of-the-pants writer (every time I have attempted to create a full story outline before posting the first chapter online, I haven't come up with anything except such fragmentary puree of shit I never tried to post it at all), well, I'm going to need to figure out what kind of story best plays to my strengths instead of trying to write directly into my weaknesses.

Ah well, I've never pretended to myself to be a top-tier writer like, well, ShaperV (thank you for your feedback) or several others, even if I do consider myself to be a solid mid-carder, so I'm not really that disheartened at finding that out nope, not really.

tldr; As I have the reputation of 'the author who quits stories because the fans drove him nuts', let me underline yet again that this is not happening this time. I'm giving up on this because I'm stuck, no other reason, I freely admit it.

Thank you all for your support.

 

[cliffc999]

For completeness' sake, here's what I had on the scratch pad for the revised chapter 8 before I realized I was stuck.

Nothing really new, it's just the part I saved from the abandoned chapter 8 before I attempted the sudden swerve to 'kidnapped by Grandfather'.

---

Chapter 8

In 1943, the Lockheed Aircraft Corporation set up its Advanced Development Projects office in response to the appearance of the German Me-262 jet fighter plane. Drawing their initial complement from the team of engineers who had already produced the successful P-38 Lightning long-range fighter and the droppable fuel tank, the ADP managed to design and build a workable prototype for the XP-80, the first US jet fighter, in only 143 days. Although the F-80 production model did not see widespread line service until the Korean War, the success of the ADP made it a permanent institution at Lockheed - a highly select and secretive group of hand-picked engineers and scientists, given abundant resources and encouraged to run amok with minimal oversight by the design bureaucracy. They were soon named "The Skunk Works" in a reference taken from the 'Lil' Abner' newspaper comic strip of the time, and over the next several decades successfully designed and built the U-2 and SR-71 high-altitude reconaissance aircraft and the F-117, F-22, and F-35 stealth fighters. Their engineering legend put the term 'skunk works' into general usage for any high-level working group given a high degree of internal autonomy and minimal oversight from the rest of the organization to work on secret projects.

And just like the Americans' Defense Advance Research Projects Agency, the name and legacy of the Skunk Works had also been inherited by the Terran Confederation and was now currently bestowed upon DARPA's top-secret multi-disciplinary R&D facility at Ganymede Base.

Achievement Unlocked: Where The Magic Happens
(Successfully Get Reassigned To The Skunk Works)
Reward: 100 CP

Heartened at the unexpected CP reward, especially since I'd tapped myself out buying the Black Computer, I immediately re-opened the Celestial Forge's interface and picked out an item that I'd already had my eye on but hadn't picked up yet. Now that I had 100 spare CP again and was about to embark on a new phase of my life where it would be most useful, it was time to pick up PhDs (Fantastic Four).

I was admittedly courting a minor existential crisis by taking this, but Genius Patrol or no Genius Patrol I needed to properly arm myself for any upcoming conflicts with the R&D bureaucracy. Like an athletics team, showing potential might get you drafted but you had to actually put up the winning #'s to get paid the big money. And while I wasn't really concerned about my personal wealth, especially given the ultracapacitor tech I'd just sold, I was definitely going to be in some serious competition for research budgets with whatever scientists were already older and more established here and I'd need every edge I could.

And so, I picked up the item that not only promised to add several more PhDs' worth of specialized expertise to my knowledge base but also to make my records and backstory show that I'd always had sufficient academic and professional credentials for any expertise I actually possessed, regardless of source. Which was frightening to think about, in the sense that the Celestial Forge apparently had the power to retroactively edit time and space and my own personal history in order to insert things that had never actually happened, but... as uncomfortable as the thought made me feel, the fact remained that I'd been violating causality as I'd known it ever since I'd first started tapping a mysterious otherworldly force for knowledge and abilities from outside reality. Now I'd just have to more openly confront that that was what I was doing.

In limited doses, at least.

So instead of arriving at the Skunk Works as a precocious young college student with some very promising theoretical math and a noteworthy commercial patent, I arrived as some type of absurd young genius who'd somehow discreetly obtained multiple PhDs in only several years, without that coming to notice until I chose to reveal it. Which had a definite affect on how much support I'd be given in my first project, because if there was one thing that people with high-end academic credentials believed in with all their heart it was that having enough high-end academic credentials was the essential proof of smartness. Which... well, I'd been starting to learn that when you were trying to persuade other people to do something then what you could get them to believe was true was often far more important than what was objectively true.

Admittedly, I was just a wee bit nervous about how Genius Patrol was going to figure this one, but one of the several reasons I'd taken this item was to test just how far the Celestial Forge could go in making these kinds of things happen. If they didn't react like they'd just had their own memories and case studies on me edited, then I'd know more about the extent of the Forge's powers. And if they did react like it? Well, then I'd have to come clean... and while I didn't want to do that at all, if I ended up needing to do so then I'd want to have that happen as early in the process as possible.

"So, Lieutenant. You have how many PhDs?" Rear Admiral Alexis Davenport, commanding officer of the Skunk Works, asked me with a skeptically raised eyebrow.

"After the first one, they were willing to accept complete-at-your-own-pace remote coursework and dissertation-only for most of the others." I deflected. In actuality I'd never attended a graduate school or written a doctoral dissertation in my life, but my latest purchase from the Forge had promised that it would materialize records and backstories as necessary to explain my degrees, and it had certainly delivered.

"I know that the youngest person to obtain a doctoral degree since the 20th century was only 15 years old, but the only other people to obtain as many graduate degrees as you have were perpetual students for decades. You're twenty-one." she said incredulously.

I honestly didn't have an answer for this one that didn't feel awkward, so I just nodded.

"And you have total recall, it says here." she said, glancing back down at her desktop holodisplay. "Between that and all your credentials, it's no wonder that you've been able to cross-reference so many different scientific disciplines."

"I think that's why I've only recently started to pick up speed with my inventing." I said, happy that she'd given me the opportunity to start spinning this in a certain direction. "One of the primary bottlenecks in R&D is that normally, no one person can know or apply everything relevant to a particular problem if some of the necessary pieces of knowledge aren't part of their normal specialty. Only I'm a... general specialist?"

"Is that how you originally got the inspiration for your FTL communication hypothesis?" she asked me.

"Yes ma'am." I said. "If you start from McAndrew's fourth equation and then cross-reference that with-"

She immediately cut off my impending flow of ascended high math nerdery with an upraised palm. "I read the precis." she said. "More importantly, so did several of the other jumpspace physicists around here. But however promising the theory look, of course it needs testing. How soon can you have a prototype design for us to look at?"

"I worked it out while jumping back from Nusku." I smiled at her, and hauled out my Black Computer, morphed into a portacomp, and beamed the relevant file into her desktop system.

"Hmm." she said, looking at it. "According to your rough estimate, we're looking at enough expense here to almost pay for a Crockett-class' entire jumpdrive."

"The production model will be notably cheaper, once we work out all the quirks." I said. "But yes, the initial prototype is going to be a bit of a project."

"Indeed." she nodded. "Still, the ultracapacitor speaks well of your talent for practical application as well as theory, and you come highly recommended. Spend the rest of today finishing your in-processing, and can you have your presentation ready to show the review board by 1100 tomorrow?"

"Yes ma'am." I agreed, having already written it at the same time I was busy finishing my preliminary schematics.

"Then if we can clear the final hurdle, you'll get your budget and your lab. And then, we'll see what happens."

* * * * *​

"Damn, it's all just flowing together." Dr. Saunders, the Skunk Works' leading jumpspace physicist, said with a commendable attempt at masking his envy.

"Sometimes you just get... fortunate." I temporized, realizing at the last minute that crediting my victory over him to mere luck would only piss him off even further.

When I'd originally gotten the Celestial Forge I'd been like a child with a new toy. Being able to perform at a vastly higher level of ability than I ever had before made me feel powerful, feel important. Even if I was capable of exercising strategic patience if I exerted enough willpower - witness my career track to date - I still was full of eager anticipation at the point when I would start being famous, where everyone would start praising my genius.

And now I was finally starting to reach that point and I realized that I only felt embarassed. Because it wasn't really my genius at all they were praising, was it?

Case in point, my new lab partner. Dr. Saunders was 37, and had had his career marked and mentored from childhood onwards just as carefully as the Genius Patrol had marked mine. Early graduation from secondary-ed. Early National Honors on his CAT exams, but with actual entry into Public Service held back until he reached age 18. Bachelors' degree completed before he even hit his Public Service draft. Double service credit and early release, just like I'd earned mine. Two PhDs before he was twenty-five, credited with refining the Vilani jump-2 drive for even greater fuel efficiency than they could manage before he was thirty. He'd been assigned to the problem of deep-space jump breakout - finding a way to plot a hyperspace jump that didn't have to terminate in a gravity well, so that a ship with extra fuel tanks could cross the 3-parsec gulf in the stars surrounding Confederation space by doing a double-hop - and had been making noteworthy progress towards that end before I'd come along.

And now a girl slightly over half his age was about to entirely upstage him, and would soon enough render the project he'd spent the last two years working on entire unnecessary... and unlike him, neither her brilliance nor her accumulated knowledge were due to her own efforts. I suppose that the accident of birth that gave him his raw intelligence could be equated to the quirk of fate that granted me access to the Celestial Forge, but all of my alleged genius and insight into jumpspace theory was from my having taken Ragnarok Proofing and PhDs. A few achievements, some spent CP, and voila! I was now being welcomed and feted as the Confederation's most brilliant researcher, but what I actually was was a cosmic stenographer. The Forge was doing it all for me, all I was doing was taking credit for other peoples' work.

I'd always felt mildly scornful when I'd read fiction about heroes who had 'imposter syndrome' - you were getting it done, so did it really matter that your gimmes were coming from the plot instead of from the normal way? The people you helped were still helped, right? The bad guys you beat were still beat?

And now I was seeing the problem from the other side and... well, younger me was still correct about that bit. What really mattered to everyone else was that the work was getting done, not about how or why. But older me was coming to realize that even if your internals didn't necessarily matter to those around you, they always still mattered to you.

"Isn't that the truth." Dr. Saunders replied to me manfully, and I pushed my woolgathering aside and got back to work.

Since I'd made sure that one of my new PhDs would be in jumpspace physics, I had all the information I needed to begin seamlessly integrating Battletech jumpdrive tech into our own native version. The actual nuts and bolts of building a jump-9 ship would still need a lot of ancillary details to be worked out, not least of them being somehow figuring a way to shrink the whole damn setup down into something of a more reasonable size, but my first project was of course the FTL communication method I'd promised that I could build, and given that I already had the full schematics for one the only thing I needed was to take enough lab time - and go through enough of the steps myself where other people could see it - that it would appear to be a process of invention, not just copying things from a set of mental notes.

The Hyper-Pulse Generator, or HPG, was the primary method of interstellar communication in Battletech. It was a variant of K-F drive technology that was used to create an artificial 'jump point' instead of pushing a large mass through an already-existing jump point. Using a giant installation the size of a small radio telescope, it fired an electromagnetic signal into jumpspace where it would omnidirectionally propagate to be picked up by every HPG receiver within range. They were also extremely large and expensive, and required equally large and expensive receivers. A 'short-range portable' HPG was one that weighed only twelve tons and required an entire Battlemech just to move.

So for my first FTL comms demonstration I'd decided to build something simpler, a variant of the "black box" or K-Series FTL comm tech that the Star League had invented almost 50 years before the HPG. Although their transmission bandwidth was much narrower, limiting them to text messages instead of audiovisual, the most advanced models of K-series transmitters had almost twelve hundred light-years of range, exceeding even the Word of Blake "Super-HPG" plot device from one of the later Battletech arcs. The K-Series technology had been abandoned by the Star League in favor of the HPG as soon as the latter was invented, and their capability to interfere with JumpDrives and HPGs had been given as the reason. But as it turned out, that reason was a lie - if properly tuned, the 'Black Box' technology had no such interference at all. Apparently the Star League, or possibly early ComStar, had wanted HPG technology instead because it made centralized control of communications far easier, and had been willing to mislead everyone else to get it.

Or maybe they'd just screwed up. I didn't know for certain, as I was having to reconstruct the motives of the people in the Battletech setting from what fragmentary lore knowledge I did have and their full technical database. It was entirely possible that they'd simply overlooked this in their research, especially given what had happened to systematic research and development upon the collapse of the Star League and the outright cargo cult level of thinking that had surrounded much of their advanced "lostech".

Still, that was the Inner Sphere's problem. My problem was making this damned thing work so I didn't fall flat on my face at the first hurdle, and I was fortunate that I'd bought all my magic PhDs because I doubt I'd have gotten enough people to listen to my theories without them. But math was math, and despite the intense academic nerd fights I'd been forced to struggle through I did manage to convince the powers that be that my 'new theories' about jumpspace interface allowed for beaming an electromagnetic signal from one precisely tuned receiving station to another, so after weeks of building, testing, refining, and building again, and after several laboratory demonstrations that indicated that the thing was working as a communications device, it was time for the first field test to see if I'd actually managed to make an FTL communications device. Because proving that we were going substantially in excess of lightspeed, let alone at the FTL multipliers we'd need to make this substantially faster than just using a jumpship, would require us to be shooting across a distance substantially further than the width of the lab, or for that matter the orbital habitat we were working in.

And so after a few weeks' of work, and some vigorous pretending on my part to have already done most of the pure theory by myself before I'd even gotten here so as to get to the field tests as soon as possible, it came down to the final hurdle. The first of our field-range paired FTL units had been finished, and one of them was sitting in front of me right now while the other one was onboard an interplanetary shuttle currently over two light-minutes away. We'd synchronized two atomic clocks to each other before placing one at each end, and at a preset time the shuttle would simultaneously transmit the same message to us both by FTL pulse transmitter and with its ordinary comm laser. The message would be several paragraphs of text to be typed in by an operator onboard the shuttle only after separating from the station, to be chosen only after the shuttle was already on-station so as to try and preclude any fraud on my part by pre-arranging a message. Obviously the validity of the test would be if both messages - the one being sent by FTL pulse and the one being sent by lightspeed laser - matched exactly, and the one of them arrived more quickly than the other. Equally as obviously, the operator for the test was someone I'd never met and who had been randomly selected from a pool of candidates at the last minute, with all suitable safeguards to prevent prior collusion.

With an incongrously quiet 'ping!', the transmitter signaled reception of the first message.

"Holy shit!" the comm tech manning the panel whispered quietly. "Um, message received, sir!"

Rear Admiral Davenport, the commanding officer of the Skunk Works, leaned forward to look over his shoulder and start reading it herself. "I [name], do hereby swear, before the Great and Living God, that during my engagement, and while I am an employee of Russell, Majors & Waddell, I will, under no circumstances, use profane language; that I will drink no intoxicating liquors; that I will not quarrel or fight with any other employee of the firm, and that in every respect I will conduct myself honestly, be faithful to my duties, and so direct all my acts as to win the confidence of my employer. So help me God." she recited. "Wait, what the heck is this?"

"It's the code of conduct for Pony Express riders in the American Old West." I answered her. "Someone's a history buff, it would seem."

"Apparently so." she agreed, both of us forcing ourselves to breathe steadily as we waited and waited and-

"Second message received!" the comm tech burst out as the panel went 'ping!' again. "Right on the dot, and... it's a match!"

"It's a textual match, but does it hash correctly?" the admiral asked tightly.

"One hundred percent." I said, peeringly closely at my own readouts. "Every bit, byte, and checksum is identical. Both signals are the exact same set of data packets. We did it!" I irrepressibly burst out at the end.

"You did it." she answered me, breathing heavily. "Congratulations, Dr. Nowak. Actual, honest-to-god FTL comms. You just put yourself in the history books right next to McAndrew."

I kept my embarassment off my face and replied as calmly as possible. "Or I will have, if and when this technology is ever unsealed from 'black' status. Because we can't let the Vilani even suspect this exists."

"No, we can't." she agreed. "But we'll still have to find a way to use it. Still, even though they'll be taking our recommendations into account, that one's for the Strategy Board. We've still got the longer-range tests to do, let alone the first interstellar-range test."

"Yes we do." I said. "And I can already see a couple things in the datalogs that-"

Quest Completed!
A Rising Thunder
Objective: Advance the Terran Confederation's tech level to be superior to Vilani Imperial Standard Technology in at least one militarily significant area before the start of the Fourth Interstellar War
Reward: 1000 CP, Terran Confederation Victory

I reeled as the notification flashed in my mind's eye. I'd finished already? I mean, yes, workable interstellar FTL communication would qualify as both a 'military significant area' of technology and well in advance of Vilani capabilities, and with the proof-of-concept a success Dr. Saunders and the rest of the Skunk Works could finish refining my design into a useable application even if I dropped dead at this very instant, but- already?

"Dr. Nowak?" Admiral Davenport prompted me.

"Sorry, got distracted." I grinned at her weakly. "And yes, we definitely need to press forward with the testing schedule. Given the clarity of the results we just got, I'm thinking we might skip the light-minute test and try for a signal from beyond Pluto orbit..."

* * * * *​

So, now what?

I stood in the wardroom of Clarke Station, one of the several orbiting habitats around Ganymede that the Skunk Works' spaceside facilities were distributed among, and stared out the panaromic window at the stars.

The sheer speed with which I'd completed my main mission from the Celestial Forge had shocked me. Admittedly, it had taken me slightly over three years to get to this point but the fact was that I'd managed to avert Terra's prophesied defeat in the Fourth Interstellar War well before it had even started. Tensions on the border had been steadily worsening, but were not yet at the levels that had prefaced the Third Interstellar War, and while ONI had several indicators of a military buildup going on in the Imperial Rim Province the Imperial government had yet to so much as start enacting trade sanctions again, much less anything more overt.

And yet I didn't feel victorious. On one level that was simply common sense - the fact that we were now apparently on track to win some kind of victory in a Fourth Interstellar War in no way meant that the conflict between the Confederation and the Imperium would be permanently resolved, so obviously I'd still have some kind of work left to do in that regard even if the Forge had yet to give me any new quests to replace the main one I'd just finished.

But on the other hand, right now I had every reason to be optimistic in my outlook. After all, one of the main forces driving the Confederation and the Imperium to keep butting heads was the fact that our expansion into the larger galaxy was unavoidably forced to be in the Imperium's direction, given the limitations of jump-2 drive and the 3+ parsec interstellar gulf surrounding Terran space on all but one side. And that was a limitation I was soon enough going to render obsolete. As soon as I could get a jump-9 drive built, we could expand rimward and trailward away from the Imperium, into areas of space they hadn't even charted yet. And if we could do that-

But, that would be a project for a later day. For right now, I really needed a vacation. I'd been busting my hump flat-out on one project or another with only brief, if any, breaks ever since I'd graduated secondary-ed, and I had over a hundred million sols in the bank from my share of the advance that High Frontier had paid my family for the ultracapacitor patent license and a whole lot of accumulated leave to spend it in. My application for some time off had just been approved, and in a little while I'd catch an interplanetary shuttle back to Terra and-

And then what?

I stared at the stars, sloshing brimfull of thoughts and feelings, and realized that I couldn't think of a single solitary thing I was actually eager to do. The recreations I'd used to enjoy were childishly simple and relatively unentertaining to my newly expanded brain, but right now I felt like I'd throw up if I even looked at a computer terminal or a lab workbench at any point in the next month. And the advice Mr. Stepczinski had given me was still filed in my supernaturally accurate memory along with everything else, so just going out and getting plastered was a non-starter as well. The last thing the Confederation needed was for their one-girl science revolution to develop a drinking problem or something.

You're just tired, I told myself. You've been working too hard for too long, and you need a rest. So go find a tropical beach , lay down on it, and sleep in and vegetate. When you get your energy back, your inspiration will come with it. That's why people take vacations in the first place.

I turned away from the window and headed off towards my compartment to start packing my bags. I'd already checked out with my chain of command, so I didn't have anyone else I needed to stop and talk to before my shuttle left. Time to start my vacation.

---

And, this is where it stalled completely out when I couldn't so much as get a mental image of who she was going on vacation with or where, and after several days of failing to I realized that my muse just had given up on trying to make this go anywhere. Damn fickle things, muses.​

 

[Faralis]

And, this is where it stalled completely out when I couldn't so much as get a mental image of who she was going on vacation with or where, and after several days of failing to I realized that my muse just had given up on trying to make this go anywhere. Damn fickle things, muses.

Click to shrink...

Well, thanks for the story anyway, cliff. It was a good one.

I honestly understand that the idea block is a difficult one to break, but well, it's a god damn shame, that's for sure.

I would have suggested either a big time skip ( to after the war, for example ), or even switching protagonists for awhile, but it's okay in any case.

You did a very good job with this story, IMVHO.

 

[cliffc999]

You did a very good job with this story, IMVHO.

Click to shrink...

Eh, at least 85% of the worldbuilding had already been done for me by the extremely excellent Steve Jackson Games' setting team, because GURPS Traveller is fucking banging for fans of the setting, IMO. They take the skeleton of the original tabletop RPG and really put detail and texture into the cracks the original left for you to fill in yourselves. All I had to do was add a few more details to focus on the micro-level of stuff they didn't have room for in a 128-page supplement.

Like, Public Service and the Draft? Canon. My take on the exams, the whole detail of administration, and the Genius Patrol? Me. High Frontier Development and the billionaire who ran it? Canon. The Skunk Works? Me. Etc, and so forth. That's an example of how much worldbuilding I had to do here... and how much I didn't have to do because I was piggybacking on an existing franchise.

Which, okay, we're fanfic authors on this board, we do that all the time. I'm just gonna be honest, one of the reasons I picked Interstellar Wars is because I was giving myself a leg up at the start instead of having to do a huge design of the whole framework myself from the ground up.

Which, in hindsight, might have been an error of laziness, because if I'd had to do more work at the outset, I'd have had more to riff off of mentally when immediate inspiration out. Or at least, that might have been what happened. At this point I'm not sure.

Oh well, if I can identify at least one goof of mine for every story I've had to abandon, and actually fix at least some of the goofs I've previously identified later in life, then that's still progress! (however slow) Here's hoping I actually improve later.