A year has passed.
"A bit boring," I thought, twirling a cup in the kitchen where I'd cooked today. On the table were chops, toast, rice, and, of course, coleslaw. I treated myself to a multi-fruit juice, blended in unique, signature combinations. Initially, I sought to avoid all the problems associated with wielding colossal power and resist the temptation to indulge in eccentricity. Therefore, my residence, a monumental kilometer-long pyramid, is entirely devoted to shopping malls and bureaucratic departments. Every square meter is dedicated to a specific function, with the exception of ample free space for diplomatic representation. There's also a vast royal hall, capable of accommodating ten thousand people for receptions. It's usually empty, which irritates me a bit, but there it is. Our personal abode remains modest. After all, I built the pyramid largely for cheap grandeur, but then quickly found a way to generate considerable income from it.
It served simultaneously as a symbol of power and the most visited building on the planet. However, iron discipline separates the "smoke in the eyes" from true functionality. Isara and I don't need much; a one-room apartment is quite sufficient. Just think about using a room the size of a football field and ideas immediately spring to mind. The Goa'uld would probably say, "You can sleep there." We'd answer: you can sleep in ten square meters. In fact, a person needs two square meters for sleeping, but let's not go to extremes. We are an ordinary family of future rulers of the galaxy, not Buddhist monks. Today we had burgers for dessert. What can you do when a wide variety of restaurants are located nearby, on dozens of floors of retail space, food delivery is elementary. And it goes without saying that this is for the ruler. It helps against all kinds of poisoning, as do numerous food analyzers. We are kind, but not crazy.
"He's bored!" Isara muttered, chewing her food. "Bored! There's so much to do, and he's bored."
"There are no planets to explore, no enemies to crush, no intar to shoot. But remember, in the good old days, how I captured planets by shooting at flowers?"
"The Guardian remembers too," the wife grumbled.
"By the way, how is he?"
"He gives out a lot of environmental advice, a lot, but only about thirty percent of it is useful."
"At least it's of some use."
Yes, I'm getting bored. Life is settling into a routine. We usually wake up around five, and by six we're all gone. I practice martial arts, improve my public speaking, and study some engineering. Then, at ten, I go to work, just as Isara goes on her break, and take over her duties. I work for about four hours, then go to lunch myself. We usually eat at the same time, together. On Fridays, we inspect all the key planets and facilities in our Empire. Only the most important ones, of course, although we occasionally pop into various cafes for a quick bite. Sorry, McDonald's brothers, you've been robbed again when it comes to the food service concept. On the other hand, I made them a sizable monetary donation. So, while they may not be developing their own businesses, their business is thriving across the galaxy. True, the Tollans aren't exactly big fans of fast food. But I like it, and that's the main thing.
"I'll be inspecting a new ship today, a Mark 3 Hattak to be exact."
"I think there were more versions."
"These are the ones I upgraded," I clarified.
"It's still surprising that no one has done something like this."
"The thinking is rigid, and it's simply cheaper to build a pyramid than to supply the Khattak."
"Marvelous".
The thing is, I figured out a way to upgrade the Khattak, and it was actually quite simple. The Khattak pyramid is hollow, so the pyramids themselves could be used as landing pads. This empty space takes up sixty percent of the pyramid, which is roughly five billion cubic meters. I simply covered it all with a thick layer of armor, giving myself a massive amount of space where I can fit absolutely everything I need. And I need a lot. It's such a simple task for me that a fifty-meter-wide cube of a naquadah generator fits perfectly into the empty space.
The generator now consumes more naquadah, but produces so much energy that it's comparable to planetary generators. There was so much free energy, I didn't even know what to do with it. But first, I worried about the generator's safety: it's covered in so many layers of armor and protected by internal energy barriers that blowing up this ship would require destroying it completely. The shield generator is also protected. I don't find it funny that O'Neill blew up that damn shield generator with two grenades. The number of weapons has increased, the shields have improved, and there's now the ability to "boost" them during combat. And there's a huge energy surplus, so much so that I don't know what to do with it. I installed more guns, missiles, anti-aircraft systems, and even activated the internal defensive fields. All of this, of course, absorbed the surplus, but it still retains the ability to enhance certain systems. However, I had to redistribute many internal compartments for the Mark II. The conversion took some time and required a fair amount of effort.
The next round of fleet modernization followed the capture of the Aschen Confederacy, as new technologies emerged that needed to be mastered and implemented, including in production. It's impossible to live for war alone when I've simply run out of ideas, and some of my projects have been implemented, so boredom is starting to creep in. Maybe I should hire myself out and fight the replicators? Maybe we should test the ship on Beleskiner? There's a difference between sixty guns and three hundred. Yes, a bigger reactor, more guns. A fivefold increase in guns, of course, doesn't make the ship five times more powerful. The Khattak isn't a Star Destroyer; it fires a maximum of forty to fifty percent of its guns on one side, and that's at best. So, based on the recalculation, it's only a 2.5-fold increase. True, the number of missiles has increased significantly; you can fire so many in a single salvo that it would overload any scanner.
I fully understood that I was creating some kind of super-weapon, but it wouldn't be a super-weapon if you simply stuffed a more powerful reactor and mounted the maximum number of weapons into the same amount of space. On the bottom, also behind the armor, were heavy missile launchers (which could be replaced with drop pods). It could fire a salvo of eighty heavy missiles per second, followed by four more such salvos. The superstructures housed other missiles, smaller in caliber. So such a ship could flood an entire sector with plasma and missiles, and with luck, engage two or three Huttaks, if not five. However, that would be schizophrenia. Why fight five enemy ships? It's better to have more powerful ships, but use them in squadrons. And if you lead the ships unescorted, things could end very badly. Yes, like the Death Star, for example.
How do I resupply my ships now that I no longer have my beloved pyramids? Like in Star Wars Episode II, where the Trade Federation spheres were in special pits with special equipment to hold the ships, I can do the same. And I did. This removed the supply issue from the equation. Plus, I now have much more advanced teleporters, so it was possible to spend a few resources to upgrade my capital ships to this scale.
"Don't you think that when the Empire sees this, they'll opt to replace their ships with similar upgrades? And if that happens, the strength of Goa'uld ships will become equal to that of the Asgard, and the 'Protected Planets Treaty' will be meaningless if the System Lords are confident of parity with the Asgard ships."
"I know, so I won't be doing a massive upgrade like this until I decide to throw them into battle to conquer the galaxy. Until then, this will be my flagship."
"What would you prefer as a title? 'Eternal Pain,' 'The Torment of Eternity,' 'The Tomb of Death,' or equally absurd titles invented by a madman?"
"It's at least a fantasy, but you're right, I'm having a crisis. A crisis of ideas. I used to have tons of ideas about how to improve everything, how to build and rebuild everything. And it seems like more technology has emerged, but the ideas are becoming fewer and fewer. Maybe this is just how old I am? But I'm still very young."
"Don't be so sad, you created one of the most powerful ships in the galaxy," my wife supported me.
"Yes, but I want something that is not just revolutionary, but also practical."
"The super-powerful ship is quite practical."
"I need to come up with something and implement it," I decided. "I need something… Something…"
"Be calm and collected, and inspiration will come. At least thanks to you, I don't have an endless stream of paperwork, just a computerized desk from which I can manage the entire Empire," Isara encouraged me.
"It was simple, we needed something revolutionary. Maybe flying cities?"
"For what?"
"I don't know that there is a huge spaceship in which people and scientists can travel."
"I think it would be useless and would require a huge amount of resources. It would be like a second star in the system."
"Okay, maybe we should make plants that can transmit sounds? Or maybe we should look for some that might exist."
"You wanted something peaceful, maybe you should try making an aquarium first."
"Ha-ha-ha, very funny. What could be complicated in an aquarium?"
"Glass?"
It's worth mentioning that I've long been the scientific director of many projects, providing assistance to various student groups. However, my independent project as director was a modernized khattak, which performed quite well in testing. Now there are sea trials and further testing. Basically, I was still searching for a project. For example, the holography department is the most hyped, and everyone is playing with holograms, and they find it interesting. Holograms are literally everywhere, and sometimes they are indistinguishable from genuine works of art. In my opinion, it was simply a convenient modeling tool, like Tony Stark's. I also developed holographic cloaking technologies, like the Eldar (nobody likes them in simulations).
On the other hand, I can already do some things. In my world, there were refractive materials that achieved optical invisibility. Of course, they don't work well on scanners, but most Jaffa constantly rely on their eyes. It's much cheaper than adjusting an energy field along an object to refract all spectra. That's why stealth devices were so expensive—they're essentially energy field projectors with extremely fine-tuned settings. I certainly won't replicate the Eldar's holofields, but I can do something to make my own troops less visible. However, if the Goa'uld equip their Jaffa with multispectral sensors like the ones in my helmets, it'll be pointless to use such tricks. Perhaps only against primitive worlds, and I have no reason to fight them.
- Think about it some more.
I sighed, a heavy sigh. I was completely out of ideas. I even made the Cerberus walker from Mass Effect, mostly as a boost for boarding parties and for fighting in tight spaces. I mean, I really have nothing better to do, and I used to have hundreds of projects. Now the only ones left are the most delusional, like the one that involves creating an army of mindless clones with programmed brains to cosplay as zombies. But these are clearly inadequate ideas, so they should be shelved under a 1123-character password. Yes, I'm not too lazy to enter it, especially for my "bad ideas." I even played with local gravity (and maybe not even locally).
It's part of the ship's defense systems. For example, if you increase local gravity to a hundred units, what will happen to the attacking forces? That's right, a puddle. And what about inventing anti-boarding tactics, which is what I myself popularized. Considering I don't intend to let anyone off my ships, this would be an excellent trap. Similar gravity traps were used at many bases, for example, if a pressure sensor sensed someone walking on it, but the camera showed nothing. This, of course, is already related to security systems, but I know the power invisibility provides, so it was worthwhile to build a very advanced security system.
"I'm sure one day inspiration will strike you, and the galaxy will see something terrible again," my wife agrees. "It will be truly terrible, just the way you like it."
"I love you too, Isara. What do you think will happen in the Senate?"
"In the Senate, as always, we'll discuss pressing issues. And Egeria's children will suck my blood, just like our governors, everyone will suck my blood." My beloved grimaces. "Why is the Senate shaped like a mushroom, not a pyramid?"
— Where have you seen a circus in the shape of a pyramid?
"I'll throw something at you," she promised.
"That's a good idea for what I should do. The only thing on my list of ideas is a network of satellites with energy field projectors to block all ultraviolet light. That sounds more like a weapon of total terror, and the Goa'uld could pay me a lot for this nonsense. Rebellion: you cut off people's light, and they become very obedient."
— Wait, what if this device can not only block, but also project, amplifying sunlight?
I thought.
— Yes.
"So, instead of turning a gas giant into a star, the Aschen could have done it your way? And did you just come up with a way to harness the weather, amplifying sunlight, literally canceling winter in some regions? And what, you could, purely theoretically, cancel the ice age on one of the Treaty planets?" Isara says.
"Y-e-e-e-e... You heard me thinking about making a weapon out of this, right?" I ask her.
- Still, you literally solved the problems of hundreds of worlds.
"Isara, it's still a weapon, or rather, a device that can be used like that. People are dependent on the weather. In the wrong hands, it would be a terrible weapon. Especially if we reverse it and overfocus the star beams, frying the planet. To a certain extent, we need strict security systems to play with the weather, so that no one can hack them at will."
— Living with you, I realized that everything is a weapon, especially a microwave.
We both winced, as Unit 731 was testing microwave weapons. It wasn't exactly clean, but microwaves were used, so it's worth considering the project more seriously, not as a joke about superweapons. After all, I use those same gravity traps to crush asteroids and extract their minerals. Luckily, my energy is practically free, albeit for civilian use. Industry still has to pay, to keep them on their toes and to finance the extraction of this very energy.
Various scientists are "playing" different games, for example, creating antimatter (on remote space stations) or with naquadria. Any dangerous experiments are moved off-planet to prevent irreparable damage. Some experiments are even conducted in uninhabited systems. For me, safety comes first, and everything else comes second. Usually, any experiment has a hazard rating; scientists have to answer, "What happens in the worst-case scenario?" And the most dangerous ones work on space stations, for example, studying viruses and bacteria. And when I dig up an ancient one, I'll lock another one on a billion locks on a remote asteroid. At least, samples of the plague. Probably a couple of billion locks. And a 2-gigaton bomb. This plague finished off the Ancients; you can't be too suspicious.
— In fact, all of humanity's inventions can be used for good, if only I could figure out how to invent a bullet weapon for the benefit of people.
"Maybe we should go to an art exhibition?" Isara asked.
"Why not, at least it'll give me a break. But if there's Cubism there, I'll grab a flamethrower."
"There are decent paintings there, I even bought some on Earth, mostly the ones I liked. After all, there are some artists on Earth who should be able to paint well."
- Yes, there was one such artist, he led the Third Reich.
"Hitler's a real sweetheart compared to the Goa'uld. And you talk to them normally."
- No, I want to strangle them too, I'm just waiting for the strength to do it.