Part 52: A bit of Family History

....................................................................................................................................................................................

“Yes, ah, now you were saying? About Structural Smoke? “ She saw where I was looking and shook em. They jiggled. I lost my concentration there for a minute. Ummm. Yes. Too bad, So Sad, that she was disembodied. I’d never learn HOW good she’d be in bed.

“Structural smoke, also called “utility fog” is impossible. I have that on good authority. I had a guy who works for a National Lab tell me on the internet one night.…and I quote.” I said

“Oh right, in that case it would have the same issues, less so but still pertinent. Especially saturation of the Rf spectrum and radiation would still be an issue but less so. You think these functions would be trivial to implement but the devil is always in the details. For example how would the controlling computer know where to grip? It needs sensors and those sensors need to transmit its information somehow. Either the logic is inbuilt into the particle, in which case the information density limit applies and wireless frequency saturation would apply, not to mention the receiving antenna would need to be much much much bigger than the particles themselves to get a decent signal to noise ratio, and even bigger if the circuitry to process and filter digital communications was omitted due to space limitations, they would be extremely sensitive to minute disruptions and a small piezoelectric effect would destroy millions of them in milliseconds…..”

“He just went on and ON. Now he’s a legit scientist, he told me that he has credentials, even more than me. Hard Science too, not just lowly engineering.” I said.

“Maybe it is. Maybe no one told my little girly. Maybe she was too stubborn to accept what someone else said as the gospel truth, she went ahead and did it anyway.” I continued.

“Buddha is supposed to have said, although it’s disputed.

Believe nothing,
not matter where you read it,
or who said it,
unless it agrees with your own reason
and your own common sense

“Well this gal must have had her own common sense and she could reason. She made a connection with some stuff she knew, from that old journal.” I told her.

“She and my niece figured it out between them and never let on to outsiders. After the SHATTER those two girls, and their families, claimed an abandoned Island in a big old lake in Texas. We called it Asgard. It’s directly over a coal seam. We started mining coal using techniques that they had developed. Tele-operated robotics, drones and that sort of thing. Pretty soon we had DiamondFog which is our own flavor of Structural Smoke. We used it to armor up the place good and proper.” I told her.

“We had decided that Texas needed infrastructure…and right NOW…to make up for the destruction left by the yankees, during the SHATTER.” I told her.

“We didn’t ask anyone’s permission. We just did it.” I continued. “We began to weave that same DiamondFog into the RainBow Bridge. We called it Bifrost, after all we had named the island Asgard. Naturally that led to us calling ourselves the Aesir. Some of us specialized in taking care of the bridge and took on the name of “Guardians”…or “Heimdalls”.

“We grew the bridge over every major highway in Texas. We left the local roads alone. We just assumed the right to use the right of ways. We didn’t give a damn about permissions. We just did it anyway.” I said

“Not that many of the highways were doing anyone much good anyway, and that was the point. During the SHATTER, and the ensuing unpleasantness, the Feds had tried to make peace by making war. They tried to destroy Texas in order to save Texas. Didn’t work but they caused a lot of damage.” I said.

“They had bombed the hell out of the interstates with cluster bombing using cratering charges. It would take billions to rebuild. We did it for free, and more quickly than anyone would have imagined…weeks, not years or decades.” I bragged.

“Soon Texas had high speed arteries, freight lanes, communications, and several flavors of pipelines, going anywhere and everywhere the main roads used to go. Even better than it was before the SHATTER.” I recalled.

“Other victims of the Shatter saw how we did it and wanted to play. We helped them. Texas became the nucleus of a confederation of small republics and I do mean small, clans actually, smaller than city states. We’d learned enough about ‘behavioral sinks’ and their consequences. We kept a really close eye on Dunbar’s number. We uncrowded with a vengeance. We had new Tesla inspired technology and we could do that. .” I said.

“Who will build the roads?” they used to say that whenever someone questioned authority or complained of guberment’ taxes.”

“They conveniently forget that the first roads were NOT built by the government…the guberment just took them over later using eminent domain. The answer would be…”roads are overrated”…you have a failure of imagination.”

“ Did I say ‘high speed artery?” That was a gross understatement. Bifrost has, in addition to the other things I mentioned, a high speed vacuum transport system. It’s amazing how quickly you can get somewhere going a thousand miles and hour….or faster.”

“People that is, and small stuff, anything that will fit in a standardized tube capsule container. They’re not all that large. For the bigger stuff trucks are needed. Trucks, even those that ride the lightning like you are, are much slower.”

“Wind resistance don’t you know.” We talked, and we talked and we talked of many things.

"Of shoes--and ships--and sealing-wax--
Of cabbages--and kings--
And why the sea is boiling hot--
And whether pigs have wings."

An Alien Cat-Girl uploaded to a Nano-bot swarm who's married to a Heimdall point man who rides the Lightning needs to know that kind of stuff, so I explained it all to her in great detail.

To Be Continued
The Next Episode will be
Part 53: Going for a Walk…
The Previous episode was
Part 51: Busted
the first episode was
Part 1 : Winter Storm

---

---

I'm

@everittdmickey
.
I write
SPECULATIVE FICTION
I have other books on Amazon.
Sometimes I also comment on the news

Sometimes it's hard to tell fiction from the news.