The Mech Touch - Chapter 14

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The Mech Touch - Chapter 14

The Mech Touch

Reading through the Mech's specifications, Ves felt all of his
satisfaction disappear. He accomplished the difficult task of building a
highly advanced mech, to be sure. His lack of understanding and his
poor proficiency with the equipment caused several problems with the
mech. The Caesar Augustus he fashioned paled in comparison to a
factory standard stock model. Several criteria showed a few percentage
points of deficiencies.
Those percentage points might as well be a chasm in the mech market.
When pilots wanted to buy a stock mech, then they at least demand
them to adhere to standards. There was no way any sane pilot paid full
price for a substandard licensed copy.
Ves took the time to search up the Caesar Augustus and its variants,
what few they were. Unlike in the real universe, the Caesar Augustus
enjoyed a little more popularity. Logistical issues such as limited
energy mattered little when you played Iron Spirit's shorter game
modes, such as the 1v1 and the 2v2 arenas. The tricky problem of
frequent repairs could be solved with a wave of the hand as the game
took care of everything as long as you had gold or credits to spend.
The players who bought the Caesar Augustus tended to be more
affluent than normal, but also demanded more of their mechs. Their
willingness to pay a little more for a higher performing mech didn't
help Ves at the moment because his own product was trash.
"Still, I have no choice but to get rid of it. I've pumped a fortune of
credits in its virtual construction. I should at least be able to recoup
the cost."
With no other choice, Ves switched to the sales page and put his first
Caesar Augustus on sale. He put a tentative price of 45,000 credits.

The price range made it seem like a deal, even if it didn't perform up to
spec.
[Caesar Augustus C1]
Tier: 5-star
Base Model: Caesar Augustus C1
Purchase Price: 750,000 gold (-50%)
Premium Price: 45,000 bright credits
Hopefully some schmuck will snap it up without reading the
specifications too deeply. Otherwise he'd have to go back to the store
and lower the price again in order to get rid of it faster. He still lacked
a lot of credits and had no reserve left to build another virtual mech.
"I'll check back in a few days." Ves said hopefully, but he could not
keep out the grimness from hsi tone. "One thing's for sure. If I want to
untangle this cluster fuck, I desperately need to become proficient in
electrical engineering."
Ves checked his Status, and found he had gained enough DP to afford
the first Skill in the Skill Tree. As a major skill category, Electrical
Engineering was cheap to learn but very expensive to master, but that
was a problem for later. Right now, he spent 200 DP to acquire the
first tier of the skill, which the System called Incompetent.
Raw information and knowledge streamed into Ves' mind. More
knowledge than he could handle tried to nestle within in his brain in a
span of minutes, and it almost caused him to blank out. He dropped to

the floor and tried to hold his screams as he held his head. Countless
irrelevant pieces of data pressed against his mind.
Lucky even got frightened enough to jump up to a cabinet, wary of any
intruders.
The pressure eased off after ten or so minutes. Ves let out deep breaths
as he tried to regain his composure. Most of the data seemed to have
been tossed to the back of his mind, inaccessible for the moment.
Perhaps the subsequent skill upgrades unlocked portions of it.
Strange.
In order to regain his calm, he took a break, taking Lucky out for a
walk. He and his father lived near this stretch of forests and plains for
many years. The house of his childhood in the suburbs had been sold,
the new owners taking in the property with gusto. Instead, his father
moved to build a second-hand modular workshop just outside the
town. Its location closer to nature afforded better privacy and made
sure nothing else got damaged if his workshop blew up for some
reason.
"Do you remember a life before the System gifted you to me?"
The gem cat meowed with a puzzled tone as he explored the nearby
bushes.
"Don't know, huh?" Ves said as he stretched his arms and raised his
head to look at the wispy colorful sky. "This is my home planet. I lived
her for almost my entire life. The only time I left was when I went to
college in the capital."
The planet Rittersberg seated the government of the Bright Republic.
They heavily controlled the climate in order to make it optimal for

human to live there. Sprawling cities, fancy villas and vast stretches of
Terran and indigenous wildlife turned it into a paradise, an expensive
one, but idyllic nonetheless.
Still, Ves vastly preferred the rugged and untamed lands of Cloudy
Curtain. The terraforming corporations who transformed the ball of
rock into a live-sustaining planet only stuck around to do the bare
minimum. They left with their fat paychecks even as incongruities
popped up. The local air smelled different than the standard Terran
norm. The summers never lasted long and it was cloudy pretty much
every day.
This was his home. He was an inhabitant of Cloudy Curtain first, and a
citizen of the Bright Republic next. Few woes occurring in the rest of
the galaxy concerned him here on this quiet planet. This corner of the
galaxy was on the outskirts of civilized territory. It held few stars, not
much exotic resources and only a few small alien polities shared the
Bright Republic's rimward borders.
Mech battles only happened occasionally. Besides the wars between
the Republic and the aggressive Vesia Kingdom, the most the Mech
Corps had to handle were lone criminals and small bandit groups too
weak to prey in the bigger neighborhoods.
This led to a life of peace and stability, an enviable state of affairs for
some people. His father purposely left the livelier planets of
Rittersberg and Bentheim in order to make his home in snoozy Cloudy
Curtain. When Ves grew up on this planet, he felt no different from his
classmates and other people around him. Only when he studied at
Rittersberg did he realize that the rest of the galaxy moved in different
speeds.
It both scared and excited him.

Eventually, Ves firmly entered this complicated, murky world in order
to fulfill his dream to become a mech designer. Just this decision alone
brought him into contact with the government, trade associations,
suppliers and more. He felt connected to the galaxy, as if anything he
did affected the rest of human civilization. Only a little, but it felt as if
his existence mattered.
"Hm, what kind of crap am I thinking? I should go back to work." Ves
decided, and led Lucky back to the workshop.
In the meantime, he made a call to Melinda.
"Hi cousin."
"Hey Ves, I was about to mail you back this weekend."
"So do you have any results you can share with me?"
Melinda sent a few documents over the interplanetary comm. "The
Caesar Augustus is a rare beast, so the Mech Corps never officially
purchased any of its models. However, it did come into contact with a
few models piloted by pirates fleeing the authorities of the bigger
empires. They even captured one intact, more or less."
"Did they do anything with it?"
"The Mech Corps may be penny pinchers sometimes, but they won't
throw away a functional mech. An ace pilot took it over and piloted it
for a few years before it got embroiled in a border skirmish with the
Vesians. It lost its left leg and a chunk of its waist. When it came back
to the hangar, the Corps decided it was more trouble than it was worse
trying to fix it up again, so they sold the rest for scrap."

"Damn, so it's gone now right?"
"Yup. Recycled down to the seats."
"Well, there goes my hope of refurbishing it. So anyway, the Mech
Corps must have learned a thing or two about the C1, right?"
"Nothing officially, but I tracked down one of the technicians that
serviced the C1."
That was impressive, and also a little dangerous. Melinda could get in
trouble if she harassed a veteran too much.
"Don't worry about it, cousin." Melinda smiled over the comm. "He
found the Caesar Augustus to be a bitch to maintain, but he still
misses it. He freely gave me the notes he kept about the mech. I've
sent it through this connection, so you should already have them in
your storage."
"That's going to help out a lot. Thanks for taking the time."
"I'm looking forward of what you can do. Be sure to give me a call and
show off your work when you finish a design!"
"Will do!"
When Ves returned to his workshop, he perused the documents
Melinda sent over. The retired technician had conveyed his thoughts
in a haphazard manner, with no apparent order in his many ideas. Ves
spent quite some time to iron out the disordered words and plentiful
jargon into something legible.

What he got opened his mind. The technician was evidently proficient
in improvisation and jury rigging. He kept the Caesar Augustus going
for years even without official replacement parts from National
Aeromotives. Though the notes contained no schematics or blueprints,
just getting to know the changes and the reasoning the technician
came up with already gave Ves ideas for his own customization plans.
His newly gained skill in electrical engineering also helped him puzzle
out the crude drawings of rerouted cables and shifted systems. The
retired technician spent some of his spare time trying to come up with
a better layout for the most problematic tangles. Not many of them
looked viable, but the technician succeeded in coming up with some
optimizations, making the mech a little easier to maintain.
After digesting the material, Ves had the urge to work on a design
immediately. He quickly switched over to the Designer and started
incorporating some of his ideas on the Caesar Augustus.
He worked on the easy solutions first. He moved a few components,
sometimes shifting them just a millimeter, other times swapping them
from left to right. Following these actions, he uncrossed a couple of
cables and rerouted them through a different channel.
When Ves stepped back and admired his changes, he realized the
technician's suggestions did have a basis on reality. The modifications
he made according to the suggestions made the mech a little less
troublesome to produce and maintain.
"Now that I've picked all the low-hanging fruit, it's time for the real
work to start."
Ves intended to redesign C1 practically from the ground up. Just
making a few changes here and there just didn't cut it. So Ves bit his
lips and started to test the viability of more drastic modifications,

some suggested by the technicians and some he figured out himself
after handcrafting its design in the game.
The changes he sketched improved the base model only incrementally.
With limited knowledge and a lack of component licenses, Ves faced
limitations everywhere.
At its heart, a humanoid mech imitated the workings of the human
body. Though hundreds of years of progress have made a mech's
mechanical workings increasingly more sophisticated, it still adhered
to the same rules. If Ves arbitrarily cut off a few cables or messed
around with its proportions, he might cause the the design to cascade
into an unworkable mess just like if he messed around with an actual
human body.
Some people started to question whether mechs would evolve to
constitute life. Ves wasn't interested in these philosophical discussions
that popped up every once in a while in college. He did not delude
himself into thinking he was playing God by fashioning new mechs.
Ves always thought his classmates who talked that way treated the
mech designer occupation as a luxury. Ves preferred to hang out with
the more down-to-earth crowd that treated the job as a way to assist
the mech pilots that defended their homes.
A week went by as Ves made some accomplishments. He also earned
enough DP to upgrade his Electrical Engineering skill to Novice. With
his improved insights in electrical engineering, he also simplified a
couple of problematic spots. This necessitated a drop in performance,
but what he lost in specs he gained a lot more in ease of manufacturing
and repair. While Ves had made some minor progress in taming the
beast, it still maintained its essential wildness and ferocity.
"I still have a long road ahead, but I'm reaching the limits of what my
skills and imagination can do."

He only managed to come up with a half-finished design. While he
wanted to wait until he could afford a few more skills with his steady
income of DP, he had to validate his design by fabricating it
personally. Without getting hands-on, all of his work remained
theoretical.
Ves finalized the design when he reached the limits of what he could
do. He named the variant the Nero after a famous person who lived in
the same time period as Caesar Augustus in Ancient Terran history.
Frankly, Ves knew very little about history. He just made a casual
search on the galactic net for some cool names and Nero popped up as
some dude with a mixed evaluation. This fit in nicely with what he
thought about his, which is what he also thought about his recently
finished design.
At least he hadn't gone ahead and named the design the Bastard Son.
The System's evaluation of the design was mild, to say the least. All of
its core systems and armor remained the same as its stock model, so
the System gave him a low rating for effort. The only thing Ves
managed to pry from the System was a base reward of 10 DP due to
the design being based on a complicated lastgen model.
He was ready to start fabricating a virtual mech. When Ves logged into
Iron Spirit and visited the market section, he found to his surprise that
someone actually bought his half-baked Caesar Augustus.
TheGrandGreenRoad.
The user name sounded like a complete stranger. Ves checked his
friends list and found nothing. Searching the galactic net only revealed
that the player wasn't a celebrity.

"Who the fuck is TheGrandGreenRoad?"
Well, whoever he was, he saved Ves a lot of trouble. "Whatever. Since
the mech got sold, I have enough credits to fabricate the Nero."
He threw the identity of the buyer to the back of his mind and entered
the virtual workshop to go to work. He was eager to see if the Nero he
produced could match the specs of a standard C1.
Chapter end