After brunch and a few minutes, all right, hours, of being alone with Ben, it was time to get back to work, for both of us.

Fortunately, as I had expected, the first item, a package of 8^th-gen nano-fab along with a basic series of 12^th-gen nano-bot designs was done quickly.

I chose an easy-to-scale fab design and sanitizing all proprietary features that I wanted to keep control over was quickly done as well.

For the nano-bots, there was only so much that could be patented. The function necessitated the form in a package this small after all. There was no real new technology here if one ignored the Q-link. That of course meant that designing a nano-bot was a matter of balancing the parameters and optimizing it for its work.

The basic package was more or less off-the-shelf designs tweaked a bit. The new seedstock on the other hand was a bit more tricky. I did not want to give them my seedstock and did not want to compromise Ben’s operation.

In the end, I designed a variant roughly between those two extremes. It was a bit bigger and smarter than what I had sold Ben, but lightyears behind what I used myself.

But as that was so much fun, and to keep an ace for Michael's sleeve, I did it again. A second set of very scalable nano-fab designs with generic basic 12^th-gen nanobot variant and a slightly different seedstock schemata, this one a bit faster, but dumber, necessitating more control from the fab, which I designed accordingly.

Sure the second nano-fab was a tiny bit more expensive, something around 2%, but it would be nearly 4% faster.

That was of course just in case Ralcon became pigheaded in the negotiations.

Then it was time to work on the main course for Ralcon. I had Warden scour the matrix for legacy code for Envision, just to know what I had to work with.

Looking into the list, I quickly realized with a sinking feeling that I had severely underestimated the scope of the problem.

And why Ralcon had not tackled it before.

Yes, the general legacy code was going back roughly 75 years. For Envision that is. That was the time when Ralcon brought out Envision 1.

But what I had not realized was that Envision 1 was technically Windows 63. Ralcon had simply rebranded the already in development last version of MS Windows.

That stretched the legacy back to the late 20^th century and something called DOS. Oh, Envision was not required to run these DOS programs natively, or the 16-bit or 32-bit apps. But it was required to at least make an emulation available. Even the 64-bit applications were only as courtesy legacy available.

But they all had to be able to be used in VR to make it work.

That would make the simple interpreter I had provisorily planned insufficient for the task. Even translating 64-bit apps would tax an average commercial computer in that way. Running an 8-, 16-, or 32-bit emulator on top of that… not with office hardware for the corpo-drones.

Add in that I had to account for some seriously old hardware interfaces, like USB, Thunderbolt, Lightning, COM-port, LTP-port, FireWire, PS2, eSATA, and SCSI, or internal like ISA, VESA, PCI, PCIe, IDE, SATA, or FDD-header. And that was not even exhausting the list.

With an inward sigh, I set myself a timer for 14 virtual days and increased my compression to the max.

It helped that I had the source code for Envision 2242. It still took an ungodly amount of time just to read that dang thing. Much less to understand it. If you think that is easy, I want you to read around 230 million lines of code.

And sorry to say so, but a couple of the Ralcon code monkeys were seriously chaotic.

Yes, part of the code were compact, efficient, in places even elegant. Unfortunately, other parts could only be described as various variants of noodle code. Some were unstructured and confused to a point where the term spaghetti code would be a compliment. Some classes and their uses could only be described as ravioli code, and then there were whole hypercomplex modules for which the term lasagna code was invented.

My estimate was that if somebody took the time and cleaned up this chaos, Envision would run around 20-30% more efficiently. Not to mention that I discovered roughly a dozen new possible exploits.

I had no clue how much of that big ball of mud was still relevant. Envision 42 was two versions ago. But seeing some of the dates when it was written, quite a bit of the garbage code was taken over from Windows 40 or so.

Unlikely that they would put in the effort to clean it up now.

In the end, I gave up on the idea of writing a software module for Envision and decided to instead go the other way.

It would be much much easier to create a sort of virtual machine that encapsulated Envision and include additional native layers for the legacy code. With the help of Warden, I managed to write drivers and software layers for all 128-bit apps and lower.

After that, it was time to surface for a bit, move my body, and reconnect with reality. Despite the late brunch, I made myself some energy-dense snacks and decided to swim a few rounds in the pool afterward.

Yes, technically I had only spent a bit more than an hour in cyberspace, but I had learned that my mind needed these breaks. I could do without in an emergency, but for something relatively lowkey like writing a VR layer for Ralcon? Why torture myself in such a way?

Long story short, it took me all-in-all five days, in real life or 250 virtual days to get the VR layer working to my satisfaction.

I tested it by building something akin to an off-the-shelf office garbage can system. To be fair, the thing was the bare minimum needed to drive a diadem. As low-key as it was, I had built a few extras, mostly modules to get legacy hardware connected to it.

Then I installed an up-to-date copy of Envision 48, the newest and ‘bestest’ Envision of all times, together with Envision Office 46. And yes, I bought the software. It was cheap enough that I did not need to go through the hassle of pirating it.

I also had the indy-fabs create as many legacy modules as I could find the plans for, as well as get copies of the legacy software.

Let me tell you, it would be a pain to use a diadem again, but it had to be done. And look, it was Tuesday again. I gave Michael the thumb drive with the schemata for Enertech, but warned him that the bribe for Ralcon was still in the works.

Apparently, Michael already had shopped the preproduction samples around to some of our intended future partners, so that they could evaluate them, along with an MSRP list.

It would still take a couple of weeks before they had evaluated the tech, but the feedback he had gotten was mostly positive.

Of course he had also provided samples to Enertech and Ralcon, and while Enertech had taken a wait-and-see stance, Ralcon’s response sounded decidedly unhappy.

So, nothing surprising here. Otherwise, staffing started to become a bit of a snag, as we simply lacked a selection of sufficiently educated workers.

Seriously, sooner or later we had to do something about the abysmal education system here. The solution was to provide unpaid training for a period where we used the Commonwealth approach of VI-controlled VR teaching via diadem. Even a couple of months of individualized high-intensity education should be enough to make the standard ‘human waste’ as the corps called the unfortunate inhabitants of Queens able to do the work.

Urgh, another happy side project, create a VI with the purpose of educating the masses. Whelp, it would be orders of magnitude easier than a medical VI, that was for sure. Maybe I could try to get a copy of Apollo. I would have to look into it when I was finished with my Envision project.

And now it was time to test the new tech. The diadem was exactly as I remembered it. Dull, ugly, slow. But at least from what I could tell, the VR layer worked pretty fine.

I had designed it in a way that made it possible to install it onto a running Envision system, and after the reboot, it would take over.

Surprisingly even in standard operation, it squeezed a couple of percent of performance out of the garbage can. Nothing to write home about, and of course without the VR function. The only way I could explain that was that I had been so revolted by the garbage code that I had designed workarounds for a few of them.

That should make the system a bit more secure, as the VR layer actually monitored the system for changes, and it streamlined some convoluted operations that were just lazy programming.

With VR active, the performance reserve crashed naturally. And hard. Not that the run-of-the-mill office garbage can did need the performance, mind you. It was just that the cheapest CPU on the market was seriously overkilling it for office applications. It would have been more expensive to make a system with the appropriate amount of power than to use the one in this can.

Now VR would just use much more of that otherwise unused power.

It took me quite some time to test the basic functionality, mostly because I was limited to the 4:1 compression of the diadem, but what I could ascertain was that it worked quite well. At least as far as I could tell.

I couldn’t kid myself in this respect, I’ve never had used either Envision or Envision office. The simple fact was that until now there was no VR version of Envision and as a Pure, I had used VR all my life.

From what I had heard, the Dalgon VR substitute for Envision office that we used in Nowhere was sorely lacking in capabilities compared with the original, and even in the Commonwealth most office drones used the Ralcon product, but as a student, the time when I needed some of the functionality of an office suite, Dalgon Workflow VR was more than enough.

I played with it for a couple of days, finding no fault personally. On a whim,  I built another few mainstream garbage cans, to give to others to test. I left them with a basic configuration, without the extras I had included for testing purposes.

I then looked to find Jacky. Of all of us here in the Fortress, she was the one most likely having used Envision somewhat extensively. I found her, as so often, in the VR room, deep in some simulation.

When I connected to the net I found that she was taking the course for implant surgery that I had given Mia as well. Apparently, she was hellbent on becoming a cybutcher. Well, more power to her, I guess.

Of course, I projected into the lesson. It was pretty clear that she was struggling with the topic, measuring the CRS variability of the patient. I remembered it quite well, and I had hated it when it was my turn to go through it.

Don’t get me wrong, it was a very important part of being an implant surgeon, at least until I had beaten CRS that is. The problem here was, that the course I had downloaded from the UWS servers insisted on doing by the book. When I had taken the course, I had only a superficial idea about how implant surgery worked.

I had later learned that the book method was cumbersome, slow, and needlessly complicated.

One could get equally reliable results with a much quicker and easier method. And if you accepted a tiny bit of risk, you could simplify it even more.

At an opportune moment, I paused the course and summoned a chair beside Jacky.

“Hey. You know that you don’t need this course, do you?”

At first, she was a bit confused by my sudden appearance and the sudden stop of the course but recovered fast.

“Oh, hey Viv. And according to the description, this is a very important and necessary course.”

I snorted at that.

“In a way. It is a very important course to get your certification in the Commonwealth. We are not in Nowhere, and you don’t want certification, or do you?”

That made her frown.

“No, not really, but be serious, this is the topic that differentiates the common street cybutcher from an implant surgeon.”

That made me chuckle.

“True. In a way. But two points negate that. First, this method is garbage. I can show you a simple, quick method to measure the variability, without the tedium of going through all this nonsense. Without 12 pages of lists, and without spending two hours calculating the variability. The way that actually every halfway competent implant surgeon uses.

And even more important, do you plan to work somewhere else? Somewhere where you don’t use cyberware produced or at least adapted by Enki? If not, the whole point of CRS variability has become moot. The cyberware you’ll get through Enki will not need it as it doesn’t trigger CRS, period.”

She looked first at me, then at the virtual whiteboard, the instructor bot, back at me, and then sighed.

“And you could not think about that little gem before I spent eight hours and who knows how many brain cells on learning this crap?”

I shrugged.

“Sorry, I have not thought about this course since I learned the easy method.”

She hissed disgustedly and then sighed.

“Well, maybe you can go over the coursework and mark other courses I don’t really need to take.”

“Sure, no problem. I should have that done tomorrow or the day after at the latest.”

With a quick, exaggerated wipe of her hand, she deleted the classroom and we found ourselves in the common VR lobby.

“Now, as much as I like you, I don’t think you looked me up just to tell me that I don’t need that course. So what can I do for you?”

“I’ve created a program that I want you to test.”

Her eyebrows rose at that.

“A program? And you need my help? What gives?”

I blew out a gust of air.

“Well, you see, of all of us here in the fortress, you are the only one who has likely some experience with Envision and Envision office.”

She tilted her head.

“Uh, yeah. I’ve used it quite a bit. Now I find myself more and more avoiding it wherever I can.”

Uh, that did not sound too good.

“May I ask why? Is something wrong with it?”

She shrugged and rolled her eyes.

“Yeah, there is something wrong with it. It doesn’t do VR. Over the last few months, I’ve learned to love VR. Alone the mental controls make things so much easier that it is ludicrous. Going back to the keyboard, mouse, and holocontrol is… like going back to the stone age.

It is just so clunky. I have no idea how ever I could stand that shit.”

Oh, good, that was soo much better then.

“Ok, well, then you might actually like what I’ve created. To give you a bit of a background, Michael is now beginning to buy out the big corps in the US, so that they leave us alone.

Most of them are easy. Give them a bit of a rebate, help them with their integration of cyberware in their products, and such. Enertech is not a big problem either. We just give them a bit of tech that they can sell and they will be happy.”

I paused and took a deep breath.

“But then there is the elephant in the room. Ralcon. Ralcon makes 65-70% of its revenue from Envision and Envision office. And as you just said, Envision doesn’t do VR. That is the reason why Ralcon has put quite a bit of effort into preventing VR.

They are losing that battle, slowly, but for now, they will do anything to slow it down. And here comes Enki, with the shiny new CRS free jacks that are only marginally more expensive than a diadem.

They already have made it clear that they don’t like it.”

Jacky nodded sagely.

“Yeah, I can see that. What I don’t understand is why Envision doesn’t do VR. At the moment, Envision office is the premier office suite, but as soon as anybody else brings out something of roughly comparable functionality that works in VR, they are toast."

I shook my head.

“I thought the same until I actually looked into what was necessary to make Envision do VR.

Envision and Envision office guarantee legacy support. Understandably, as the big argument for them is that there is an unbelievable amount of third-party software available. Any competition would need to start from zero in that respect.

And of course, Envision is… let’s say parts of it are not optimally programmed.”

“Hm, ok, but then, why don’t they develop an overlay for VR or something like that?”

“An overlay that would be able to accommodate all the legacy hard- and software would crash the performance. Sure, even a mid-level home computer would run it cleanly, but they make their money with office systems. The cheapest of the cheapest. What I call garbage cans.

And those would choke on it.”

Jacky frowned for a moment before her face cleared up.

“You have put quite a bit of thought into this, haven’t you?”

I smiled at her.

“Yup, I have. And the solution is not to put an overlay into Envision but to put Envision into a virtual environment. Something that will take over all the problems the legacy makes and leaves Envision itself running on parallel. And if you guessed that this is what I have created you’ve guessed right.

I’ve made a special garbage can to test all this legacy excrement on, and a couple of cans for normal office work. I think it is fine as it is, but I’ve never worked with Envision.

And so, could you run one of the cans through the grinder if it is all right? If it works fine, we can make you a new powerful box with Envision, but for now, I need that thing tested.”

She way she looked she was not quite sure that she wanted to try it, but in the end, she shrugged and nodded.

“Why not? It can’t be worse than vanilla Envision.”

I chuckled at that.

“Nope, it is a tick better than vanilla even outside of VR. But look at the bright side, if it does what I want it to do, you can use your old tools again, and this time in VR.”

That perked her up considerably. “You’re right. I hadn’t thought about that. I just thought that I just hated to have to use Envision.”

Then she frowned again.

“That makes me think, why the heck hasn’t Ralcon made Envision VR capable.”

I just lifted my hands helplessly.

“I’m not so sure they can. They will get crucified if they abandon the legacy hard- and software. And to be honest, parts of Envision are coded so badly that it is very hard to do.

Now, look at the state of education here in the US. With very few exceptions, you are either rich, a useful corporate drone or you don’t get an education.

Rich people don’t go work in plebeian jobs like a code monkey for something like Ralcon. If they fancy programming, they either go freelance or work for a small, chic studio, soothing their ego.

Useful corporate drones on the other hand usually lack the imagination and inspiration to be great at anything. The handful who are creative enough to be good usually run afoul of office politics and are either relegated to do the garbage jobs or driven out of the company entirely.”

I could see that she wanted to protest, to refute my point, and she opened and closed her mouth a few times in quick succession.

When she finally answered, it was rather meek compared to what I had to guess she wanted to say:

“You know, I got my education right here, in NYC.”

I shrugged.

“And let me guess, your family is strictly middle class, but not employed by one of the corps?”

I saw her eyes widen in surprise, and she nodded slowly.

“Yes, you’re right. But how… “

“How do I know? Around 95-98% of the people making it to college are either the children of some execs or have been indoctrinated from birth by their corpo-drone parents, the corp-school, the corp youth services, and so on.

The remaining 2-5% have parents that are well off enough to afford college for their children but are not beholden by any corporation. In other words, the almost nonexistent middle class.

If you were the child of an exec, you would not have been on the drunken owl, and you show way too much drive to be a brainwashed corpo drone.”

She frowned, narrowed her eyes, and tilted her head, looking at me with suspicion.

“Wait a minute. How do you know those things?”

I reeled back a bit in confusion.

“What do you mean?”

“Don’t play coy now. We are talking about you, Vivian DuClare. Genius, educated, and the emotional ability of a brick. How did you figure that out?”

A brick? I felt a bit hurt, even as I had to agree with her. But a brick?

“I am good with data. And I have looked into the universities here. The percentages are easy enough to find out. It was a little bit harder to find out the characteristics that define the 2-5% group, and even I can easily see that you are no rich brat. And you are also no meek little drone.”

She frowned harder.

“You’ve looked into the universities here? Why?”

I rolled my eyes.

“Because I was considering taking a few courses there.”

For a moment she simply stared at me, before she broke out into loud laughter.

“You… you wanted to go… go to coll… college here?” The sentence was disrupted by her laughing, and I felt myself become a bit irritated.

“Yes, I considered it. Something wrong with that?”

That made her laugh even harder.

“Sorry… but… but… you… frat boys… arrogant professors… the image…”

I impatiently tapped the tip of my foot, waiting for her to get herself back under control.

Finally, she managed to calm down a bit.

“Sorry, but really, just imagining you reacting to one of the arrogant frat boys there. Or more likely, not reacting at all. I so wished to see their faces when you just ignore their posturing.

Just to go on and humiliate some of the professors there, so sure they know it all, thinking that the students are only there to admire their lofty intelligence.”

She giggled another time.

“But I wouldn’t wish that to you. Meeting all the assholes there, being constantly pressured, challenged by professors who used university politics to get their position… no, I don’t think a US college is a good place for you.”

I shook my head in confusion.

“Why do you think I would humiliate the professors?”

“At best a third of the professors actually know what they are teaching to some extent. The rest get by with bluster, arrogance, and reading from the book. Even if you did not want to show them up, you would just by asking the interesting questions, that they couldn’t answer.

Even the ones who do know what they are teaching would be outclassed by you. Let’s be honest, you would just read ahead, and in anything but social topics would probably ward off your boredom by correcting the official books.”

She shook her head sadly.

“No, sorry, but university, any university, is not for you. If you want to learn something, really learn it, you get some virtual courses and work through it in a week or so. Otherwise, what would you want in a college?”

I snorted.

“I wanted to be among other young people. Maybe try to make friends.”

Again, she shook her head.

“Nope. Not your kind of entertainment. Let’s be honest, mentally, you are what? 500 years old?”

“No, only around 180, maybe 190.”

“In other words, you are older than the professors there, much less the students. And what friends would you want to make? The drones? They spent most of their time brown-nosing to the rich kids. The rich kids? I would give you a week before you destroy one of them. They are arrogant assholes.

The middle class? The few of them who are there are busy keeping their head down, not to draw the attention of the frats and sororities, and try to actually learn something.

No, college here in the US is brutal, and unless you are a rich kid, you won’t really enjoy it.”

I raised my eyebrow.

“But I am rich.”

“You have no family, no connections, no corp at your back. Yes, you have money, but to them, you are just another toy to use up and throw away. I think you’ve fallen for the myth of the all-American college. Of fun, and camaraderie, and parties and just a good time.”

I had to agree at least somewhat here, as much as I did not want to, and so I nodded.

“That might be true. You’re saying the myth is false?”

“Of course it is. It is still carefully maintained by the colleges. After all, they are businesses and need to make money.

The problem is that there is absolutely no discipline for the rich kids. Their grades are mostly dependent on the power their families wield. Security is in their world view just there to keep the rabble away from them if they don’t want them there. What they think of as fun is nothing of the kind for the rest of humanity.

The majority of students are there on a corporate scholarship, which in reality means they spent their time either studying hard to justify the expense or being the lackey to one of the rich kids. They have no time for something like fun.

The rest of us? We have to work even harder than the drones because our families pay for our education. And we have it harder than the drones because we don’t even have that shred of influence that a corpo-scholarship-drone has. And god forbid one of the frat boys or sorority girls takes a fancy of you.

You either yield to the position as a toy, or you leave the college. In either case, you are fucked. Often literally.

No, the college dream is long dead. But I have to ask if you don’t know that, how is it in Nowhere?”

I let my head hang for a bit.

“Bummer. Not that I really had any great hope anyway, but I like to dream sometimes. And there is a big difference in Nowhere. Somewhere in the 2110s, some forward-thinking council members managed to convince the rest of the jerks there that it would be a good idea to remove fallible humans from the education-equation and they created Apollo. A VI with the sole objective of giving every citizen of the Commonwealth the best education they can and want to achieve.

I am sure, quite a few of the high and mighty regretted that decision since, but the people who designed him made sure to anchor Apollo so deep in the laws and institutions of the Commonwealth that it is absolutely impossible to get him out.

Somehow they gave him the right to remove every obstacle to his objectives, with the council not realizing that that included them as well. And he got access to the military and peacekeepers to enforce it.

In other words, if the council gets the idea of shutting Apollo down, they most likely will find some military bots in their bedrooms at night.

And Apollo keeps the bureaucrats, the university politics, and all that garbage in check. He enforces the requirement to actually educate the students, and that the grading is fair. He provides campus security via bots.

Honestly, sometimes I think Apollo is the sole saving grace of the Commonwealth. Even the triple-As won’t go against him.”

Jacky’s face turned whistful when I described how education worked in Nowhere.

“That is… the people who did that were pretty smart I think.”

“And devious. But the result is that the Commonwealth is the technologically most developed nation. Unfortunately, that is the only point where the corrupt parts of the council can’t mess things up. And they really mess up everything else to their hearts contents.”

“Hey, still better than here. Here they fuck up everything.”

She chuckled softly, while she shook her head.

“But back to business, you want me to test the VR mod of Envision, so ok, when can I have it?”

I started to answer before I got another sudden thought.

“Um, that depends on if you want to test it on a high-end system that you could use later on or one of the garbage cans I have made.

The high-end system I would have to make first. A couple of days. The garbage can as soon as you tell me where you want to have it.”

To her credit, she thought about it before deciding.

“I think I will look into it before you put the time to make me something better. If it works, then it should be easy enough to transplant the system. If not, there is no reason to waste the effort.”

“Your decision. So, where do you want your garbage can?”

“Hm, I think I will take over one of the offices in the south wing. I mean, I am essentially the CFO right now. So, can I have a nice office with a nice chair like here in the VR room?”

What type of question was that?

“Uhm, yes, of course. Why couldn’t you? We have more than enough chairs at the ready anyway. A desk is quick and easy to produce. The rest of the equipment can come over time. For the test phase, you can do without peripherals like a keyboard, mouse, holo-projector, printer, and sound system, and if we make you a dedicated system we will include them. Takes only a couple of days to get that stuff anyway.

So top floor? Executives area?”

She smiled beautifully.

“Yup, that would be nice. So… how long?”

I shrugged.

“The desk is printing right now. High glossy carbon here, we have the capacity right now. Some bots are in the process of moving one of the chairs that are still in the crates to an office there. The can… well as soon as we are done here you can get it, or we can have a bot bring it up there.

Decorating is your personal job though. I’m no good at that.”

After I said that she jumped up and began the logout process.

“No time like the present. Let’s see what you made from the old, decrepit Envision.”