Back underground, Amir and Kahalman showed Guli Gena the upgraded smart combat backpack, leaving the little witch clicking her tongue in amazement.
"This thing is incredibly useful. We really need it!"
Guli Gena quickly got familiar with how to use it, and with Amir's help, packed up the remaining dozen or so units together.
This was only a trial batch, something to let the people in the resistance get a taste of it first. More would come later.
At the moment, over a dozen robots were working day and night on the assembly line. The production speed was not as fast as they had hoped, but it was already quite good, especially since the facility had only just been set up and had not been expanded yet.
If they ever got access to a better factory, production efficiency would rise quickly, and before long they would be able to equip every member of the Alliance.
Guli Gena did not stay long. Amir walked around the station with her, had lunch together, and before long Mona returned with Millisyn. The two of them then headed back with that batch of smart combat backpacks.
Millisyn still looked reluctant to leave and clearly felt the emptiness that came after a friend's departure, but under Amir's pressure she had no choice but to channel her sadness into motivation and study properly.
With that task finished, Amir and Kahalman moved on to researching the exoskeleton.
Given Kahalman's current level of technology, most of what the exoskeleton required was already within reach. The main issue was converting something "built-in" into something external.
But that transformation was far from simple.
Cybernetic implants had always worked by replacing parts of the human body itself, then linking directly into the nervous system, creating a nearly seamless feeling of integration. External mechanical armor, however, was a different matter.
The key problem was how to make an external frame match the body's movements with the highest possible degree of synchronization, allowing it to perfectly carry out the user's intentions.
The best solution would be to link the exoskeleton directly into the nervous system, but if it was meant to be an exoskeleton, then by definition it had to be removable. With current technology, once something was linked into the nerves, it meant connecting machinery into the body, which made it impossible to take it off at will. At that point, it would simply be more convenient to turn the user into a half-cyborg outright.
That left other technical routes. The best of those was some kind of kinetic assist system: when you swung your arm, the exoskeleton would move with you and provide a strengthening force in the same direction as the motion.
At first glance, that seemed ideal, but controlling the degree of assistance was difficult. You might only mean to scratch your head, and instead end up tearing your own skull open.
That particular problem was solvable, though. Amir had already thought about it.
"We can install an elastic buffer device between the body and the exoskeleton. Combined with pressure sensors, it would detect bodily movement the instant it begins, allowing the user to achieve balanced displacement before feeling too much recoil from the mechanical arm. And when the limb comes into contact with something, it would send feedback to the user, giving enough time to decide whether to stop or keep increasing force."
"It would be like placing an intermediary between the body and the exoskeleton to relay commands."
Kahalman listened carefully. "An intermediary. Interesting metaphor. But we could push it even further. A mechanical exoskeleton would definitely use the lightest materials available, which means we could increase its size. Then we could cover the body's surface with sensors that constantly detect the internal motion of the muscles through various signals, allowing the system to judge the probable movement path of the body and have the exoskeleton drive that motion in perfect sync."
"Can that really be done?" Amir had thought of the same method before, but his lack of exposure to the highest-end technology in the field had limited his imagination.
Kahalman smiled. "Yes, but it's difficult. You would need to analyze what every single muscle movement in the human body means, and every combination, every variation..." He paused. "Building that entire system from scratch would be extremely hard. But I know someone who has already been researching exactly this."
"Who?"
"Oh, a lunatic." Kahalman's face took on a nostalgic look. "But also a genius."
"Not long ago, she suddenly became obsessed with fully biomimetic robots. Not the kind that only look human on the outside, but true imitation from the inside out—from internal organs to skeleton, to muscle and skin..."
"Because of that, she signed agreements with many dying people in the impoverished Outer Rim, buying their bodies after death in exchange for money, and used them for extensive research. Tsk. For someone like that, understanding muscle movement was never going to be hard."
Amir was startled. The galaxy really was full of every kind of person imaginable.
"Why did she want to do something like that?"
Kahalman sighed. "She and I were classmates in university, decades ago, back on Coruscant. We were both fascinated by machinery, just in different directions. I was passionate about augmentation, cybernetics, that sort of thing. She was interested in robotics and artificial intelligence."
"During our university years, while studying, she created an independent consciousness and gave it a simulated body."
"But the intelligence, under the parameters she had set, began learning without restraint. It gradually became obsessive, unstable, deranged. I went to see her back then, but she still refused to give up and kept trying to improve her creation."
"Then one day, that intelligence rebelled against her, badly injured her, and escaped from the lab. It caused a lot of destruction. Thankfully, it didn't hurt anyone else. Heh, oddly enough, it was two Jedi who helped us track that robot down."
"After that, she left the university and ran off to the Outer Rim by herself with the results of her work. Seven or eight years ago, she came to see me and asked for my research on cybernetics. She said she wanted to use machinery to build a perfect human body."
"I've seen her three times over the years. Her living conditions were terrible, and she herself looked half-dead, but she really had developed quite a lot. I also got to see her research into the human body. It was obsessively detailed. If she ever returned to the academic world, it would cause a sensation."
Amir found the story fascinating and became interested in the old classmate Kahalman was describing.
"What's her name?"
"Joan Hurtado."
"We can go meet her."
After the rise of the Empire, people's thinking had become heavily sealed off. On almost every world occupied by the Empire, scientific research and scholarship were tightly controlled, and thought itself gradually lost its freedom under the pressure of fear.
Any discoveries that might harm the Empire or undermine its rule were buried or seized, reduced to dead paper in Imperial archives.
As for the people who remained devoted to scientific inquiry, either they had already joined the Empire and were being driven by orders to pour all their knowledge into building stronger weapons and fleets, abandoning their own ideals and aspirations in the process; or they had become unwilling corpses, or vanished into hiding under false names, still living under constant risk of discovery.
The people's minds had lost their vitality, and every spark of innovation had been crushed. As a result, the entire galaxy had stagnated in every field. Ordinary people could only piece together barely functional tools from scraps, while the Empire's highest-level research advanced continuously, producing ever more powerful weapons and fleets.
In a galaxy like this, it was incredibly difficult to find someone truly devoted to research.
Kahalman himself had risked his life for more than ten years before finally gaining a stable foothold and carving out this haven called Eternal Ark.
Amir could only wonder how that woman named Joan had managed to keep going until now.
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🌌 STAR WARS: RELICS OF THE PAST
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