The Mech Touch

5695 Worthless Humans

The new wind blowing in the Transhumanist Faction had massive implications for Ves. The policies supported by the Evolution Witch were drastically different from that of the Chosen Human.

One of them was a born miracle, a potentate who held the unbroken record for possessing the most optimal genetic aptitude that humanity had ever measured. Despite his immense privileges, he never rested on his laurels and worked hard to realize his amazing potential for the good of the human race.

The other was a woman who had risen up from a life of struggle and adversity. She was a pilot who had been perpetually locked in a struggle against death. She overcame her many congenital flaws and evolved past all of them through sheer grit and determination. The force of evolution literally represented a newer and better life to her, and she grew eager to spread its bounty to the rest of the population.

Ves felt torn between the two faction leaders.

His inclinations as a researcher and innovator loved the younger and much more forward-thinking Evolution Witch for her more vigorous support and license to experiment more freely.

His perspective as a leader and a citizen of red humanity grew wary of the flood of changes that these policies may spark. The new leader's directives would definitely ripple throughout the entire augmentation sector. A lot of geneticists had long entertained all kinds of crazy ideas on how to push human boundaries beyond their limits, but they never dared to act on them due to ethical and safety violations.

Ves had met numerous biotech researchers throughout his career. Many of them had ideas swirling in their minds that would never get approved if they attempted to act on them. Everyone from this entire sector was crazy. It came with the territory, much like how most mech designers used to dream about piloting mechs rather than designing them for others.

He shook his head. This was none of his business. Since the Transhumanists dared to unleash this storm, they probably took enough measures to contain it. The benefits were clearly worth it for them to go through with this plan.

By the time that Ves' meeting with Professor Vector Loban came to an end, he still remained reluctant to move too quickly with the Carmine System.

"I feel my accumulation is too lacking to design more advanced Carmine mechs." He told the Transhumanist. "I can understand your eagerness to move forward and see whether the Carmine System will work well with biomechs, but I am simply not ready for it. Even if we design one, I think we should keep it as simple as possible in order to reduce the amount of variables that can produce complications."

That was not what Professor Loban wanted to hear.

"What are you willing to design?"

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"Let us start off with designing third-class Carmine mechs." Ves suggested. "First-class and second-class mechs are more powerful, but that also makes them more difficult to control. They are much stronger in a physical sense when compared to the human physique. According to my understanding, an attempt to bring mechs and people closer together doesn't end up well for the latter if they are not strong enough to cope with the rapid increase in power."

The case of the Uranus came to mind. The Yuri Machine also supported this theory.

As eager as he may be to make rapid progress, Profesor Loban was not a biomech designer who had lost all of his intelligence from the moment the new policies came into force. He understood the logic of Ves' argument and could not respond with anything better.

The Transhumanist expression grew a little sour. His main purpose for cooperating with Ves was to enable him and his like-minded colleagues to convert their own bodies into powerful biomechs. They could not do so when their only available option consisted of third-class mech models that easily collapsed when subjected to vastly more powerful enemies, of which there were many in the Red Ocean.

"Very well." Professor Loban's expression eased as he accepted this 'concession'. "You are correct. The space peasants of the lower zones are so abundant that they can easily absorb setbacks related to our Carmine mechs. They are more desperate for power than other red humans. We have always struggled to make them useful and bestow more meaningful roles to them. It should not be difficult to convince them to test the early iterations of our Carmine mechs."

The man spoke as it was already a given that the two of them would produce a range of collaboration works.

Ves did not like the fact that he essentially got brow-beaten by the Evolution Witch to fast-track the development of the Carmine System and steer it in a direction that sounded a lot riskier than the alternatives.

What could he do about it, though? It would be bad if he managed to attract the attention of yet another god pilot and got on her bad side.

This was why he settled for this 'compromise' with Professor Loban.

As much as he hated to admit it, third-class space peasants were truly too marginal. Their population was their greatest advantage as it did not take any fancy or expensive designer baby shenanigans for them to reproduce. Raising and educating third-class children was also a lot cheaper.

However, their industries were almost worthless and their mechs were so weak that they struggled to fight against the weakest alien raiding fleets that invaded the lower zones.

Funnily enough, their lack of worth also saved them from the brunt of alien aggression. Rather than wasting time and combat assets to crush all of these cockroaches, it was better to inflict greater losses on first and second-fleet mech forces.

No one important enough really cared about third-raters to sympathize with them if anything went wrong.

Ves also gradually assumed this mindset as he continued to consort with the likes of the mechers and other first-raters. Their problems and considerations were much grander in scope than the more trivial concerns of a bunch of poor and meaningless space peasants.

Even though he used to be a third-rater himself, Ves found it hard to stand up for his former people. There was no room for any redundant sentiment when the future of red humanity was at stake. If he had to treat the poorest and most deprived citizens of human civilizations as his test subjects, then so be it. Maybe he would be doing them all a service by enabling many of them to gain an easy power boost that they could never attain through other means.

Ves briefly discussed plans to begin their collaborative design work. His schedule was already packed, so Professor Loban had to wait at least a year or so before they could begin to work together.

"I can afford to wait." The mecher said in a much more measured tone now that he had reined in his enthusiasm. "The delay will benefit us as I will have more opportunities to study and familiarize myself with your current batch of Carmine mechs. I will also have ample enough time to refresh my familiarity with third-class mechs."

In other words, Professor Loban had no clue how to design a third-class mech and needed to do a lot of cramming to avoid making a fool out of himself!

Ves needed to do the same, actually. He had not caught up with the latest developments in third-class mech design. His lack of practice also caused him to grow rusty. If he wanted to be serious about serving his third-class customers, then he should at least treat them with the proper amount of respect.

"They used to be my people, after all." He whispered to himself.

He finally teleported back to the surface of New Constantinople VIII after he bid farewell to the enthusiastic Transhumanist.

There was plenty of work and obligations for him to get back to. Not only did he have to continue to raise his growing children, he also had to keep track of at least half-a-dozen mech designs at any time. He also had to keep up with his studies on top of everything else.

"Good work, leggie." He said as he patted the solid exterior of his cyborg left leg. "I see you have made a bit more progress in progressing the Dark Zephyr Mark III design."

It was silly of him to talk to the detached miniature brain that was embedded in his own leg. It was not even a separate incarnation of himself.

He didn't care. His wife complained about his habit many times, but she eventually gave up when he proved incorrigible.

"How much closer have we come to turning this into a viable combat asset?"

This was a good question. Gloriana had done much of the work while Ves still had to spend a lot of effort into studying archetech before he was able to make more meaningful contributions.

That said, he had already gained enough of an understanding of the exotic alien tech to know that it was not that easy to get an archemech to work.

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One of the advantages of archetech was that everything became interconnected with each other.

This was also a disadvantage as it became difficult to troubleshoot anything made out of archemetal. Glitches happened a lot more frequently, and it took a lot of work to trace their causes as they needed to be isolated first to identify them. His lack of familiarity with archetech made this job a lot harder.

This made designing the Larkinson Clan's first true archemech a huge pain. The design remained completely theoretical for now. Neither he nor his wife had any access to a prototype or scale model of the new design. The lack of concrete examples of their work meant that they lacked a lot of proof that their design solutions were actually good enough to work.

The most probable scenario that would happen once they had completed enough work to fabricate a prototype was that the machine would not even turn online.

It could take weeks if not months for Ves and Gloriana to painstakingly trace and troubleshoot all of the errors that prevented the archemech from operating correctly.

Ves felt frustrated by all of the additional delays, but he persisted because he knew it was worth it in the end.

Once he or more rather Gloriana cracked the code on how to design a functional archemech, they would be able to apply all of their lessons and template solutions on their subsequent archemechs.

The Amaranto, the First Sword, the Riot, the Bastion, the Everchanger, the Minerva and all of the other Larkinson expert mechs would gain the massive benefits of transitioning to a superior tech base!

It would take less and less time to design the subsequent archemechs as Gloriana gradually worked out all of the common issues of trying to apply her knowledge in her design projects.

Ves would benefit as well, though his lack of priority in this particular field would make it unwise for him to dabble in archemechs by himself.

This was not good news because he aspired to build up a mech roster that exclusively consisted of archemechs to the Premier Branch of the Larkinson Clan.ɪꜰ ʏᴏᴜ ᴡᴀɴᴛ ᴛᴏ ʀᴇᴀᴅ ᴍᴏʀᴇ ᴄʜᴀᴘᴛᴇʀs, ᴘʟᴇᴀsᴇ ᴠɪsɪᴛ ɴovᴇl(ꜰ)ir(e).nᴇt

"Maybe I need to scale back to those plans." He considered with a frown.

He still needed to study for at least two more years before he was confident enough to design an advanced first-class mech, so there was still plenty of time for him to work on his shortcomings.

Ves turned his attention back to the current design and tried to speed up his progress. The sooner he and his wife managed to produce a prototype, the sooner they would find out if they had done a good job all of these months.

"Let's hope that it is not a total failure."

There was a chance that the entire foundation of the new archemech was rotten to begin with. The only way to prevent this was to show the mech design to a knowledgeable consultant, but this was unacceptable. They just had to work blindly and hope for the best.