Finding myself in the garage, I surveyed my new kingdom. The gleaming homogenizer, massive thermal press, vacuum chamber... I looked at them not as tools, but as the foundation of the future. Mine and Peter's R&D empire. And the thought of dismantling a two-thousand-dollar homogenizer for its motor for some momentary experiment felt like an act of vandalism. This was equipment for creation, for pure science. And what I had in mind required a different approach. A survivalist's approach and master of cobbling things together.
Scratching my head, I made a decision. A trip to the radio market, or, as it's more properly called in the US context, electronics secondhand. A small open pavilion in Brooklyn, where thick air hung with the smell of dust, unkempt vendors' sweat, and old plastic. Mountains of dead tech piled on tables, awaiting either disposal or a scavenger like me. Without haggling, I walked the rows. But now I looked at this junk with different eyes. My new engineering experience saw through casings. In an old laptop, I saw not a pile of pixels but a working voltage converter and lithium-ion cells. In a food processor, a powerful electric motor with gearbox. Whether it worked or not didn't matter. I needed their organs.
Returning home, I dumped my haul onto the living room floor, creating a real graveyard of technologies. And for the second time that day, I scratched my head. Before me lay a mountain of possibilities, but no clear path. I felt I was missing some key element, some philosophy that would unite all this into a whole.
Opening the System, I understood exactly what. In the technology tab, an unpurchased skill awaited me. "Disassembly Risk." A skill allowing creation of modular, "properly-breakable" things that retained a chance of reassembly after destruction. This was it. The philosophy of a survivalist engineer, for whom any device was primarily a set of spare parts. Without hesitation, I poured 100 OP into it. Unlike the skull-splitting flow of "Technological Modernization," this was like flipping a switch in my brain. A quiet revelation that gave no new knowledge but organized what I already had, building it into a new, flexible system. 300 OP remained in my account. Two hundred were reserved for Uncle Ben's cure.
Now, armed with double knowledge, the experience and genius of a colonist scientist and the philosophy of modularity, I looked at the purchased junk. Chaos transformed into a component library. And my brain exploded with ideas.
A conditional analog of Stark's arc reactor? In my head, the concept of an electrochemical plasma accumulator instantly formed. It wouldn't generate new energy from nothing but would release ionic energy from available chemicals with monstrous efficiency, creating a self-sustaining plasma reaction. Yes, it would be larger and cruder than Stark's creation, with lower efficiency, but damn it, this would be a portable energy source decades ahead of Earth's technologies! And I could assemble it here, in this garage, from trash!
And there were more absurd concepts, born of Martian genius. Quantum loop reactor. Technology based on quantum mechanics exceeding this world's understanding by an order of magnitude. It would literally "pull" energy from quantum vacuum fluctuations. Clean, inexhaustible source requiring no fuel. But it needed a completely different level of equipment and materials I didn't have.
"Alright, stop floating in theoretical physics clouds!" I reined myself in. Need to focus on the pressing. I mentally audited my needs. Weapons? Check. Requires modification, but for the current task of "stay home and don't stick your neck out," more than sufficient. Mobility? Tempting. But without superhuman reaction, speed was just a way to break your neck faster. Flight? Interesting option for the future, possibly even near future. Defense? There it was. Bingo. You can never have too much of it.
A pang of annoyance hit me remembering the "Protective Field Generator" from Arcanum. Useless recipe based on mythical ores I couldn't even come close to processing yet. I couldn't follow it. But what if... what if I solved the same problem but with different methods? Create my own energy shield that could be integrated into "Proteus"? Sounds not just interesting. Sounds like an almost perfect first project.
I surveyed the electronics laid out on the floor again. My gaze caught on an old hair dryer and kitchen mixer. Why? For a second, I didn't understand myself. Then the colonist engineer in my head helpfully laid everything out, and a flash of insight occurred in my brain.
Problem: create an energy shield.
Required: plasma source and containment system.
Component analysis: Hair dryer: high-speed fan + heating element = directed emitter of superheated ionized gas. Proto-plasma gun. Mixer: high-RPM electric motor + several neodymium magnets from old hard drives = rotating magnetic field generator. Containment system.
Emitter + Containment = Plasma Shield. The concept was born. Crude, energy-intensive, unstable, but workable. For an ordinary person, creating this in a garage was unthinkable. But not for someone who, albeit in a dream, assembled an anti-gravity grenade from several robot vacuums.
That scientist, whose memory and experience were now mine, had something more than just knowledge. It was fundamental understanding of reality's very fabric, at the level of physical constants. And this was an absolute cheat. Now I knew a small "secret," a life hack that made the impossible possible. The secret lay in using resonant frequency. No need to build cumbersome magnetic traps like in sci-fi movies. Just needed to make the system sing the right note.
Thanks to inherited knowledge, I felt, not just knew, that a rotation frequency of 47.3 hertz, calculated intuitively, at the intersection of thermodynamics and hydrodynamics, would cause a "plasma cascade." It would provoke quantum tunneling of electrons in heated air, turning an ordinary heat flow into a self-sustaining plasma shell. This wasn't magic. This was just physics this world hadn't figured out yet.
"Turns out, I'm not just hacking tech..." I whispered in amazement into the void while my brain designed the step-by-step process at light speed. "I found the 'language' to speak with this world's physics, and it answers."
The excitement was akin to euphoria. My garage turned into an operating table for forgotten technologies. Screwdriver, soldering iron, multimeter, electrical tape. Simple tools of a surgeon about to perform soul transplantation into dead tech.
First on the table was the hair dryer. Disassembling it with surgical precision, I extracted its heart, a nichrome coil. Simple heating element capable of heating air to 800 degrees, quite sufficient for primary ionization. Next to it lay its motor with fan. Then came the mixer's turn. Its steel whisk blades, crude and utilitarian, were to become the vortex generator, spinning ionized air into a turbulent cocoon. Its motor, more powerful and high-RPM, would provide the needed speed. The life source for this Frankenstein was to be a lithium-ion battery from an old drill. I opened its casing, accessing the cells, and soldered in a simple stabilization circuit from capacitors desoldered from the laptop motherboard to avoid voltage spikes.
Next came calibration, the most delicate part of the work. Connecting the multimeter to the heater, I began adjusting its resistance, adding millimeter by millimeter of copper wire scraps. My fingers, guided by Master Watchmaker's precision and Martian engineer's knowledge, worked flawlessly. I knew that at precise resistance of 12.7 Ohms, perfect resonance would occur with blade rotation frequency. This effect, similar to laboratory "plasma windows," would amplify ionization tenfold, allowing plasma to stabilize without external magnets.
Finishing with components, I began assembly, following the new "Disassembly Risk" philosophy. No monolithic constructions. Only modules. Heating module: nichrome coil in its own plastic casing with threaded mounts. Vortex module: mixer motor and blades in a separate block, for which an old router case was perfect. Energy module: battery that could simply be pocketed. For a strange hunter of mythical mice and exotic trap crafter, modularity was religion. One part broke, replaced it without disassembling the whole system. Need an upgrade, created a new module and connected it. Everything like Lego.
Pulling the "Proteus" suit from the garage, I began integrating my creation into it. The vortex module went on the belt with sturdy clips, like a buckle for some cyber-samurai. Being right-handed, I mounted the heating module on the outer side of my left forearm. The idea was for superheated air to exit from it and be caught by the vortex going up from the belt. The battery went in an inner jacket pocket. I carefully ran modular wires with connectors along the suit's inner side, adding a removable rheostat in another pocket for power control.
Very crude. Very primitive. But this was a prototype. Trial run. And it should work.