Chapter No.143. New Idea.

There's always room for a new idea.

We met in the meeting area off the hidden pool. Molly, Marie, Margaret, Alex, Alicia, Helen, Barney, Vince, Uma, Onuki, Tiana, Octavia, Alexa and I were assembled to discuss the construction of a new fleet of ships.

"What I have in mind is revolutionary and will not be easy to implement. I want to assemble a fleet of ships that resemble the Borg vessels of Star Trek."

"You don't mean those ugly cubes, do you?" Alex said.

"No, I was thinking of something more like the spherical ships with many decks and plenty of room for around a hundred thousand androids."

"Wow!" Barney blurted. "That's going to be huge."

"Would having us crammed into one large ship be a good idea?" Uma asked. "Wouldn't it attract a Tyco attack?"

"Yes, but we would be much stronger because of our numbers," I said. "And, we would be not be traveling alone. We would have lots of vessels with us."

"I'm not sure how stable a large ship like that would be," Molly said. "Size adds mass, which in turn adds the need for more power. If you just consider what a hundred thousand androids would weigh, considering that each of us weighs around 100 kilograms, you end up with ten million kilograms."

"Alex and I have worked out some of the math and it looks feasible. The main problem is how to incorporate the power generation systems and engines in such a vessel."

"If the warp coil is in a protrusion around the circumference of a spherical vessel, the engine would have to be in the exact center of the sphere because of quantum symmetry considerations."

"Yes, that makes sense. We could position the agricultural and recreations decks around the center core because they require the most vertical space."

"Where would the command deck be?" Alicia asked.

"I would imagine that it would be in the exact front position of the sphere relative to its orientation," Molly said.

"I agree. There would have to be a semicircle structure on the back to house the pulse engines."

"There also has to be a weapons array," Alex said.

"We'll have to figure out how to incorporate that into the design."

"Are you going to include one of these hidden pool chambers?" Marie asked with the hint of a smirk on her luscious lips.

I smiled. "Sure, why not. It keeps the riff raff out."

They laughed.

"Okay, let's all sleep on it, so to speak, and Alex and I will come up with some plans to look at. We can meet to discuss them."

The meeting broke up without any dissent.

The next day, I went down to engineering to see how Alex was doing with a preliminary design.

"I've having a problem trying to figure out the configuration of the graviton tubes," he said.

I looked over his proposed diagrams. "Yeah, the problem is with a spherical craft rather than a flat one. I would think that the tubes would have to be conical spirals with the wide ends up near the top and bottom and the narrow sections at the center."

After making some adjustment, Alex had a new design. He ran the math to determine how uniform the artificial gravity would be throughout the proposed vessel. "That looks better. I'll have to adjust the configuration to achieve uniformity."

"At least it looks as if it'll work," I said.

"How are you coming with the engine designs?" He asked me.

"So far, so good. I had to expand the power generation by a factor of ten to get the vessel into a workable mode of operation. The problem with that is that it takes more antimatter. Molly's working on a more efficient energy generation from annihilation. If she's successful, we might be able to pull it off with our current antimatter production."

"It's hard to imagine how one could get more efficiency out of our matter-antimatter mix chamber."

"It's all about extracting all of the energy possible from the gamma ray photons and neutrinos that result from annihilation," I said. "It comes down to not allowing any of it to be wasted."

Alex chuckled. "This reminds me of what the engineers of the 19th century went through to get the maximum amount of work from steam power."

"They were dealing with the conversion of heat into mechanical power. We're dealing with the efficient conversion of matter into energies predicted by Einstein's famous equation."

"With a bunch of quantum mechanics uncertainties thrown in," Alex said.

"Especially that."

He laughed.

I sensed that something was wrong, so I teleported to the command deck and took my seat next to Alexa. "What's happening?"

"Several Roamer ships have just arrived. I think they want you to visit them."

I could see the operations chamber of one of the Roamer ships in my mind and teleported there.

The Roamers looked a lot like the artificial robotic character in the Orville series, who had taken the human name Isaac.

"We have recovered a number of your kind from seven universes," the leader said. "They are in suspended mode in capsules. Do you want them?"

I wasn't sure what he meant, but I decided to play along. "Yes. How many of them do you have?"

"Seventy thousand."

That made me pause. "You say that you recovered them from different universes. How did you recover them?"

"We extracted them from planets orbiting stars. They were left there to deteriorate by the one you call Tyco."

That revelation caused me to hesitate before saying anything. "The individual we call Tyco exists as data that can appear as an avatar."

"We are aware of that. We have suffered losses from his attacks."

"I am sorry about that. We also have suffered losses."

"We have developed advanced technology to avert his attacks. We will send it to you along with our latest survey data of the multiverse."

"We appreciate that. Where are the androids you recovered?"

"They are on our vessels. You may remove them."

I could see them in my mind. I teleported them in batches to our various ships.

"Thank you."

The leader didn't react, so I teleported back to the Explorer-3's command deck.

"I just transferred seventy thousand androids in suspended mode to our hanger deck and the hanger decks of the other vessels in our fleet. I'm not sure what they are, but the Roamer leader said that they recovered them from planets in seven different universes where Tyco had left them to rot."

"Only that bastard would do that," Alexa said, frowning.

"We will restore them," Judy said.

"Thanks. We'll distribute them after we check them out for any Tyco code."

I had no idea what these new additions would look like, but the fact that they were recovered from seven different universes proved that Tyco was all over the multiverse, which would make it much more difficult to remove him.