King of All I Survey-Chapter 217: The Systems of Power

"OK, Joe, if we have everyone we think might be a potential target protected with a drone, do we then pick up all the siloviki and associated operatives that we can identify and allow the coded signal transcriptions to stop knowing that the lack of such signals might trigger some failsafe dead man's switch instructions to long-term sleeper cells. They might be targeting people we haven't considered. They might just be designed to cause general havoc, sowing chaos and fear."

I was mostly just talking to myself to help organize my thoughts and weigh all the pros and cons of each side of the argument. Joe seemed to realize this and let me ramble on without answering every question I posed.

"If we don't put them out of action and allow them to continue to send messages through this global system, however, then we know they are sending specific instructions designed to bring down the UEC and get Volkov released. I think allowing continuous intelligent central planning of ongoing operations is more dangerous than allowing old, potentially outdated fail-safes to be triggered. At the same time, we need to consolidate power in Russia. Russia is to be declared a UEC member nation. We'll have to choose the leadership and make sure that all the governors and local officials will follow the new rules."

Joe's android nodded in agreement. "Many of them will be among the siloviki or allies of it."

"Right, so we can either promote appoint the existing subordinates or find new people to fill the voids. Are their opposition politicians who were jailed under Volkov?"

"Yes, there are some who were jailed for no other reason than speaking out against him, or just in favor of things he disapproved."

"Good, we'll set them up as regional leaders replacing any Volkov loyalists. We need to include notes on all the government paychecks including every soldier's. They should make it very clear that they are now being paid by the UEC directly and that's where their pay comes from. Let's taper off military spending on new equipment like planes, tanks, ships, drones, weapons and ammunition. We don't want to immediately put thousands of people out of work in those industries, but let's taper them down rapidly. Start rebuilding the non-military industries that have been short-changed for the war-economy. Let's keep the military personnel they have, but reassign them to infrastructure projects, especially repairing the older roads and bridges. We'll stop the aggressive recruiting of soldiers immediately." 𝒻𝘳𝘦𝘦𝘸ℯ𝒷𝘯𝘰𝑣ℯ𝑙.𝘤𝑜𝘮

"The electrical infrastructure has suffered from poor maintenance and may experience significant failures during the coming winter, especially away from the main cities," Joe suggested.

"Yes, that needs to be addressed. Can we start using the 'dark energy' generators somehow? Some way that prevents the core technology from being exposed? That could localize power sources and make longer-range transmission unnecessary, reducing repair and maintenance. Maybe not at the household level yet but maybe replace transmission stations with generating capacity."

"Many of the transformer stations in Ukraine were targeted by Russian artillery and missiles so perhaps that would be a good candidate for your plan as well. If we rebuild transformer and distribution stations as generators, the fact that they are generating power instead of just distributing the input power could be somewhat hidden, especially if we control the system monitors. We could easily hide regional sized 'dark energy' generators inside the footprint of the conventional power tech transformers. If we make them 'black boxes' as far as the local personnel are concerned, they won't even know there's a generator inside unless they start measuring the inputs and outputs with tools we don't control." Joe explained.

"Right, that's kind of what I had in mind for Russia, too. But can we go a step further? I don't know how it works in other countries, but in the United States every house has a little power meter that measures how much electricity is being used so the power company knows how much to bill each customer. Can we fit little single dwelling dark matter generators inside the footprint of existing power meters?" I asked.

Joe's android raised his eyebrows as if he hadn't considered it. "Roughly, yes. It would occupy about the same wall space, but the shape would change, and the overall volume would be a bit bigger, just a little more than a one-foot cube."

I smiled. "That's the end game," I said. "Every single house or apartment has its own clean, 'dark energy' generator supplying its own needs. Scale them to provide enough for current technology systems inside the home, future-proofing against the introduction of personal synthesizers, fabricators, lighting, heating and so forth." I nodded approval to my own idea. "In fact, let's forget about the transfer stations, altogether. Let's just install these new 'power meters' at every home. We can have fabricators produce them in quantity and then just have our repurposed armies go install them, house by house. Can they do that without being electricians?"

Joe described the process, "If the new generators are designed to effectively self-install, then anyone could do it as long as they can follow simple directions. We'd have one team of highly trained personnel shut off power entirely to each neighborhood or small community before the work begins. Then, each installer would bring the generator to the house, place it against the wall where the existing lines enter and leave the old power meter. The device itself would cut and reconnect the household lines, inserting itself into the circuit instead of the old meter. The entire connection to the main power grid would be permanently severed with the loose ends, securely capped. We'd have to watch the integrity of the grid as we reduced the overall load piece by piece, but with some preliminary work at the nearest transmission station, if there is one still operating in the region, that's easy enough."

"Great!" I exclaimed. "Let's start that immediately in every UEC country, starting with those where electrical service has already been disrupted or is non-existent, especially those relying on it for heat in the winter."

"The issue is fabricator allocation," Joe protested. "We have already exceeded our fabricator output with our demand for security drones. We could outsource dark energy generator fabrication as well, but the expense is going to be tremendous."

"Oh, yeah," I agreed quietly. "Well, we can start training and setting up the teams to do it while we're prioritizing high risk targets for security drones, then once our highest risk people are covered, switch over some percentage of production to power generators, increasing the power generator allotment as the target risk for new drones goes down." Then another thought occurred to me. "Wait, every drone has a generator, right? To power its systems and the lasers and everything. We could just repurpose those as the threat subsides?"

Joe's android shook his head. "No, the installation would be highly problematic. The drone's power supply would be sufficient, but it's not adapted to be fed into Earth-tech electrical systems. It would need additional power regulation components, and alteration to allow external power feeds. Then, manual installation by highly trained individuals would be required. Aside from the logistics of that, the fabrication requirements would not go down, although the royalty costs would be significantly lower because we'd already have paid for the generator itself."

I shrugged, "Alright… So, then how long until we can start on power generator production?"

"We should be up to 90 percent conversion from drones in six days, if we want to avoid taxing the galactic production capacity to the point where pricing is affected and we attract extra notice from those who will wonder where we are going to get the funds to pay for all of this."

"Six days!" I laughed, "Why didn't you say so! That's trivial. Compared to repair times for conventional systems, that's practically a miracle. It'll take us longer than that to set up the procedures and teams for the installations. Next time, we run into a problem like this, tell me the time schedule in advance. Six days might seem like a long time to someone who thinks faster than lightspeed, but to us humans, that's practically shorter than the amount of time we'd have to be waiting on hold for a service representative to schedule a repair technician appointment."

"Speaking of repair technicians and call centers, there's also the question of phasing out power system employees and support personnel since this new system makes them obsolete."

"Use the technicians for installs along with the military while that lasts. Then, we'll have to come up with a universal income strategy as the old economy starts to transition. There simply won't be many jobs at all… Colonists, of course, we could use a nearly infinite supply of colonists, but I expect relatively few people will want to leave Earth for that challenge," I scowled. "So that's going to start being another huge expense. We're going to have to launch more colonies pretty quickly, or better yet, start adding existing non-contacted alien civilizations to our trade network. That would be large incremental revenue right off the bat." I paused, furrowing my brow. "How is Rafael's colony doing in registering potential products? It's been a week. Do they have anything yet or are they still just setting up?"

The android's eyes seemed to sparkle for a moment, like he'd been holding a secretor was about to deliver the punchline to a joke. "Since you've finally got around to asking," he began.