Work in progress
I’ve been taking a more social stance past couple of weeks. Orient Express. A long weekend in London. Slower progress on creative projects but that is no bad thing. Means I’ve been seeing a lot of my friends. Meanwhile, the Nanomech system simmers on in a positive way; nearly finished, I just have to flesh out ideas for what happens when disassembler / replication units go wrong – especially those “home-brew” types created by characters. Although starting to see an idea take shape for another novel (that would be #4 on my list of current novel plots I’m fleshing out) about the world of Yellow Dawn (Earth) but in the far flung future – the ultimate consequences of the Influence of Hastur after the secular defences of humankind have failed. We’ll see, might not work out but it’s an exciting prospect and would give me a choice of three zones for future novels: 1) pre-Yellow Dawn, cyberpunk thrillers with a dose of horror 2) Yellow Dawn post-apocalyptic survival and 3) a strange far flung twisted future Earth.
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The weapon by his side looked like a sword, the kind of twin-edged blade with a tapered point that would not have looked out of place in Roman times. But this was late 21st century and the world had long since stopped looking like anything a historical figure would recognise: Yellow Dawn had made sure of that. The whole sword, from the ridged hilt to engraved blade was formed of a slightly glossy black material, glistening in the early dawn light and glittering with flecks of gold and green. It was pure nanomech. With a mental command from his synaptic bridge, he could have squirted a radio signal that would have made the whole thing devolve back into an inert and unthreatening state: an object that looked like a stubby bone handle. He wasn’t about to do that right now. Out here, in the Wilderness, having a visible weapon was one more small reason for somebody not to try and mess with you.
The design of both states was his own, something that hinted at his impressive coding skills.
It wasn’t just a sword, it was a computer, raw processing power dispersed through the device; he’d loaded it with AI-Emulation software and the thing – he called it Slash – actually had a bit of a personality. More importantly it carried a whole bunch of skill-soft within its memory, things like how to hot-wire a scavenged vehicle from the side of a road in the middle of nowhere and convert the hybrid powerplant to old-school biofuel. Or what plants to avoid eating when the hunger got so bad even the idea of sucking the leather armour wrapped around his forearms seemed like a good idea. Skills like that made a difference out in the Wilderness.
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So, making good progress with the new bolt-on rule system, Nanomech and Synthology, have fleshed out pre-configured nanomech technology that characters can purchase “ready made”, plus rules that allow characters with correct skills to buy raw clumps of nanomech (cubits) or grow their own, and then configure it to “do stuff” by writing deployment code for different things. Currently have things like Swarm Sentry and Surveillance (wasps) to Senz-Wire (intelligent razor wire) through to Smoke-Blades (the blade of a weapon “shatters” into millions of nano-particles inside of victim, causing havoc with organic systems).
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