The Mech Touch

It took a lot faster than a week before a developer from Optaar Integrated Solutions made contact with Ves.

After a short and highly informative talk, they quickly found that while the Larkinson Clan did not possess nearly enough of the exact first-class exotics needed to make any of Optaar's transphasic active stealth systems, they could still work around this limitation.

"There are numerous materials in your inventory that can substitute the materials utilized in our standard designs without heavily impacting their performance." The first-class developer spoke as if this was a trivial task for him and his company. "As for the remaining materials that cannot be substituted without designing a new line of products from scratch, you will have to procure them through other means. Be warned that their cost may be more than you are comfortable with, but they are vital to the functioning of our stealth systems."

Ves did not look concerned. "We have so many different varieties of salvaged first-class materials on hand that we should easily be able to swap them for the key exotics for the stealth system. I'll just post a trade notice in a trading forum in Davute so that savvy traders will come and fulfill my requests. I may have to trade at a loss and wait a month or two before I get everything on my wish list, but I will make sure to have all of the materials in stock before I begin to fabricate my expert stealth mech."

This did not concern the developer from Optaar Integrated Solutions. He was merely tasked with helping his latest client develop a custom variant of one of his company's existing active stealth systems.

Such requests were not unusual for development companies. In fact, it was often where they earned the bulk of their revenue. Clients who tended to request these sort of personalized services cared more about maximizing performance than cutting costs.

Every major client's circumstances were different and unique. A one-size-fits-all approach rarely satisfied them, so the better and more desirable development companies always adopted business models where they were more than willing to customize and design variants of their standard products.

Naturally, the price for this service was anything but cheap, but the Yorul-Tavik Clan had already covered all of the expenses. What was even more important was that since the clan maintained a long and fruitful business relationship with the development company, it had been able to secure help immediately without needing to be put on a waiting list.

Ves continued to discuss his overall requirements and expectations for the active stealth system with the company's developer. Neither of them dared to go into any specifics, as mentioning anything concrete about the stealth capabilities of an extremely crucial expert stealth mech over an unsecure communication channel was the height of foolishness!

Optaar had already promised to send one of its specialized engineers to Davute in order to work on the stealth system in person, but Ves would have to puzzle out a lot of elements on his own in the first few weeks.

As the two continued to exchange general knowledge and insights, both sides became impressed with each other.

The first-class developer did not expect a second-class Journeyman who never had a history of designing a serious stealth mech to possess so much knowledge and mastery of mechs in general and stealth systems in particular!

Although Ves clearly sounded like a second-class Journeyman, his problem-solving skills and his broad theoretical basis matched the capabilities of first-class mech designers!

Ves relied heavily on his comprehensive evolution as well as the Senior-level Stealth and Cloaking Enlightenment Fruit that he coincidentally won from a past lottery ticket draw.

The former boosted his cognitive capabilities as well as his affinity and intuition towards mechs and all of the tech around it. These improvements were so far-reaching that Ves had essentially relied upon his own mysterious evolution to substitute and in some cases surpass the expensive suite of augmentations that first-class mech designers took for granted!

For his part, Ves clearly experienced the differences between talking to a first-class developer and a second-class developer.

He worked plenty of times with people who fell into the second category. He was on a first-name basis with many engineers who worked for familiar companies based in Davute such as Melmen Advanced Systems and Morton Tech.

While those engineers possessed an astounding amount of depth in their narrow fields of expertise, none of them could match the depth and breadth of a developer working for a Rubarthan company like Optaar Integrated Solutions!

The latter's much more transhuman intellect and cognitive functions easily allowed him to outperform an entire second-class development team!

The difference in productivity was so high that Ves gained a much better understanding of how the tech industry worked in superior environments.

The demands imposed by extremely complicated high technology were so vast that baseline humans simply couldn't get a grip on it anymore.

If any form of augmentation became prohibited, then a team of dozens of highly educated and accomplished engineers could barely match the work of a single transhuman first-class engineer.

Even then, the former would still exhibit much lower productivity due to the complications of communication, knowledge sharing, friction, personal conflicts and all sorts of other messy stuff.

Ves realized that humanity had progressed its technology base so quickly that heavy augmentations became mandatory in order to maintain the existence of its civilization.

This was a scary notion. Too many humans at the upper end of society pursued drastic augmentations that purposefully distanced themselves from their own humanity.

In other words, the thinking and data processing capabilities of people like Ves and the engineers working for Optaar Integrated Solutions reached inhuman levels by design!

This raised all sorts of ethical and sociological questions. While the upper layers of human society became increasingly more alienated from the original form of their species, the bottom layers mostly remained true to their race.

This was rather ironic, especially to an individual like Ves who started off from the bottom and steadily climbed his way up the layers.

He understood the perspectives of both sides and recognized how the divide between the two groups became even worse over time.

Perhaps one day the society of today would blow up because the disparity had grown too wide. Ves hoped the Big Two remained on top of this issue to prevent this disaster from happening.

"Very well, I have what I need to make the necessary preparations on our end." The developer eventually said after a lengthy exchange. "It is not every day that we are asked to provide a stealth system for such a low-powered mech such as yours. We normally work with machines that can supply at least ten times as much energy. You will have to make a large number of adaptations in order to support the demands of our tech. In particular, I would look into adding secondary short-duration power sources to your machine."

Ves nodded in confirmation. "I have already added that to my agenda. I will be working on this issue for the coming weeks. Hopefully, I will have a complete framework ready by the time your man arrives and begins to work on adapting a first-class stealth system to my Ghost Project."

As the call finally came to an end, Ves went over all of the changes and modifications he needed to make in order to make the Ghost Project more receptive for a highly advanced active stealth system.

The choice to go for a powerful and highly effective stealth system came at a hefty price. The products offered by a Rubarthan development company like Optaar were entirely geared towards first-class customers. Even if the occasional second-rater dropped by to place a specialty order, those instances were far too rare for its engineers to make a standard product that met these needs.

When Ves visualized the final state of his first expert stealth mech, he imagined a complicated, overengineered machine that was much more lopsided in its technical capabilities than was customary.

As Ves met with his wife at a later time and discussed how they needed to make substantial alterations to the Ghost Project to accommodate a new stealth system, Gloriana looked less than satisfied.

"Your greed for a first-class stealth system is presenting us with all kinds of problems." She said as she placed her hands on her hips. "This is no different from trying to mount a battleship cannon on a small and inadequate destroyer-class hull. The proportionality is gone as the energy demands of our expert mech is completely out of balance. Why couldn't you have stuck to marrying second-class stealth technology with first-class materials? In that way, you can still get a more resilient and combat capable expert stealth mech that you so badly wanted without increasing its energy requirements."

She had good reasons to get pissed. The drastically increased demand for energy meant that the expert mech needed to remove important internal components to make room for additional energy cells and other related parts. This would cause the Ghost Project to become slower, weaker and less effective in direct confrontations.

Ves was fine with this little sacrifice. "The immense increase in durability will more than compensate for the decrease in offensive power. In any case, the Ghost Project was never designed to beat the Dark Zephyr in a straightforward mech duel. It will be much better if it can leverage its distinct strengths, namely the Geist System and its first-class active stealth system, to defeat its opponents through asymmetrical warfare."

His wife still remained skeptical towards this vision. "I thought you wanted to turn the Ghost Project into a battlefield assassin that can effectively take out unsuspecting expert mechs. Your latest changes will make this expert mech worse in this aspect. You are putting an inordinate amount of faith in that Geist System of yours. Not only is it a completely new and untested offensive system, but it is unlikely to work against other high-ranking mechs as they excel at defending against and repelling metaphysical attack methods."

"You make a good point, Gloriana, but I believe the Geist System can partially overcome this advantage. Don't forget that the best way to defeat an expert mech is another expert mech. This is because both of them are amplified by willpower and true resonance."

"So?"

"If the Geist System is working by itself, then what you said is true." Ves said. "However, if it is empowered by not one but two different sources of extraordinary willpower, then I have a theory that it can overcome the inherent defenses of an opposing expert mech! Just think about it! What would happen if dozens of resonance-empowered fiends torment an isolated expert mech? The latter's resonance shield will come under enormous pressure, especially if its expert pilot is still young and inexperienced."

"You're mad! That is impossible!"

He shook his head in disagreement. "It is not as outlandish as it sounds. I have modeled the Geist System after Commander Casella Ingvar's domain and the Minerva's iconic Commandeering resonance ability. The principles are roughly the same, but the subjects and the underlying tech are different this time. The Minerva has proven to us that a large number of weak and negligible standard mechs can whittle down powerful enemy expert mechs as long as they are imbued with true resonance. Why should it be any different when the same is applied to a bunch of spiritual fiends?"

Try as he might, his wife still did not approve of the weird direction that he was taking the Ghost Project. The current plan for their expert stealth mech had deviated so much from its original vision that she practically suffered whiplash from her husband's habit of chasing after shinies!

She let out a sigh in exasperation. "You know what? Go do what you want. I will minimize my involvement as much as possible so you have all of the room you need to follow your whims. This way, the success and failure of the Ghost Project will largely depend on you and you alone. You cannot blame anyone but yourself if Venerable Zimro Belson receives a bloated monstrosity at the end of this project."

"That won't happen. I know what I am doing. Everything is going according to my design." Ves confidently claimed.