Chapter 06 Renegotiated Contracts and Laboratory Tours
The next day as I set in the meeting listening to everyone go over the different slush funds and contract fat. That was shoehorned into all of our contracts that those we got rid of used to enrich themselves. I come to a realization.
Since the planet is run by corporations and my company has control over all of Japan and Southeast Asia that makes me a de facto Emperor of this entire part of the world. For the first few moments of that dawning on me, I was a little stunned. I had to look back in my current body's education and memory to see if there was any point in history at which there was some form of transfer of power. From what I can figure out there was never an official transfer of power from governments to controlling corporate entities.
The government's instead were manipulated into seeding more and more control and authority through their bureaucracies to the corporate entities. Until eventually, they were running the entire bureaucratic side of the governments and by then when the government's decided to fight back, it was too late.
This is something I should make note of and remember for my future plans. The slow creep through the institutions can be a deadly and dangerous tactic.
As this meeting is starting to wind down, I review through my implants recordings of everything we had gone over, including all of the major contracts that we started out going over either eliminating the excess or wherever possible using it to speed up the projects or funnel it into something else. Hopefully without letting anyone notice what's happening.
After all, why get rid of financial resources? When you can divert them to something more useful.
Going over those first few batches of contracts took the entire day and late after when most of the executives would be going home. As I'm looking at the list of hundreds possibly thousands of smaller contracts. I think this is going to take most of two weeks or more. Which as I think is quite fitting, since it's a time-honored activity for corporate criminals to hide their money laundering and thieving in smaller contracts. That's probably where we're going to find most of the excess we need to take care of.
(3 and a half weeks later.)
Turns out it took the better part of a month just to go over all of the various contracts to track down all of the excess. Those assholes were siphoning off or wasting billions from this company. I was severely underestimating them when I thought it was only millions. I had to hire an entire separate investigation company to dig through their financial paper trails to see what they did with all that money.
On the bright side, I was able to earmark a large percentage of some of that waste to some of my own personal projects.
I've decided that some of those funds are going to be going to research and development for faster easier construction methods for smaller domes. I remember in my old life there were several companies that created concrete dome houses that resembled something that you would find in the dragon ball anime. They were faster, cheaper and easier to build than normal houses. However the esthetics never really caught on.
I think it might be time to look back on the concept and see if the technology has advanced to where I could spawn a branch company to handle smaller construction using the same style construction for smaller cheaper projects. Instead of using my primary company which is set up to build domes covering multi mile across cities. Spin off a smaller company optimized for doing smaller projects. That would help the population in my area.
The real sticking point with this concept is power supply. The large city domes are where they are because of available and abundant geothermal energy. To do viable construction and repopulation of more remote areas as well as recovery of the area would require a more abundant power source that could be relocated to that area. Something no company appears to be interested in so far.
If this can be pulled off, it will go a long way to securing the long-term survival of my area's population. Which is something I am deeply concerned about. The more I review the history of this world's biosphere and ecological disasters, the more concerned about it I become.
As I enter my manner and make my way exhaustedly to my bedchambers. I use my implant to make tomorrow's agenda and schedules starting with visiting Miss, Ryoko Yamaguchi's area and have her walk me through the projects. She's had enough time to at least get a start on the fusion program I set her on.
If my plans for that smaller construction company and the future environmental reclamation are going to come to fruition, that fusion technology is going to have to be a big part of it.
After another long day of mentally slogging through contracts. I and Ms. Yamaguchi make a visit to her section of the main facility and her R&D team she has there working on the focus fusion project.
Ms. Yamaguchi seems to be very excited. Apparently she's eager to show me what her team has accomplished.
"Right this way, Sir. With the information you've already shared with us, we've been able to complete our prototype. We were even able to make quite a few improvements over the original design." "Really? What type of improvements?"
"Well Sir, the original design required the device to be fired very much in pulses like a combustion engine. The fuel would be injected into the fusion chamber where magnetic fields would pull it into the magnetic filaments. The natural instabilities of those filaments would cause them to kink into a plasmoid. Which would then compress itself into essentially a microscopic quasar, forcing the fuel to burn itself in nuclear fusion reactions until it was essentially burned up. A process which would take milliseconds."
"So very much like an internal combustion engine you would have to refill the combustion chamber before firing it again. Then repeat the process to produce usable energy." "Yes Sir, that was the gist of the design. It was quite effective and efficient for its time. However we found that we could do much better."
"With modern engineering technology, we were able to redesign the device to maintain the fusion reaction while continuously feeding the nuclear fusion fuel into the reactor. Originally several of the cycles of the chamber would be dedicated to cleaning shots to remove residue. Our redesign takes care of that problem by introducing an inert gas that cycles through it in a pulsating cycle to maintain the cleanliness of the chamber and prolong the lifetime of the device and decrease the maintenance required."
"Also Sir, we've been able to vary the fuel it's capable of taking. The original design you gave us required hydrogen boron. With our advances we've been able to redesign it to take basic hydrogen, hydrogen boron, and even various heliums as fuel."
"Very good." I say as I look at the prototype device. That resembles a large refrigerator.
"The best apart Sir, is that this redesign, as well as the original does not require any of the more difficult to acquire materials such as superconductors or field altering metamaterials."
I turn to her with my eyebrows raised and ask her. "How small does your team think they can make this device without using any of those hard to source materials?"
She immediately goes to one of the displays in the lab and brings up a design. "Sir, using basic materials. This is the preliminary design for a smaller unit we've come up with so far. This is the actual dimensions."
What she shows me is a sphere about the size of one of the red dodge balls from my youth in my other life. With what appears to be giant spark plugs plugged into both ends of it with a large thick torus ring on each side right around the spark plugs where they connect into the ball. The whole thing is inside of a carry frame, resembling the bar frame used to carry an old Honda generator from my past life the whole thing is roughly the same size to.
Looking at this design I ask her. "About how long will it take to Build and test this design?"
"With our current schedule? We should have a unit in the testing phase by this time next month Sir." She says.
As I look at the design and go over my future plans. I smile slightly and nod my head. Then I turn to her and ask.
"Have you done any design possibilities for the use of the more exotic materials? Superconductors and metamaterials, etc. To see how small you can make the design." I ask knowing if she did not. Then someone on her team probably did.
She nods with a. "Yes Sir," and brings up a new design on the display.
As I look at the new design, I am taken back for a moment. It actually resembles Tony Stark's arc reactor from the MCU movies. There are some obvious differences in the design. For one it doesn't have a glowing circle or triangle in the top of it that lights up. Instead. It has a glowing sphere about the size of a Golf ball.
She looks up from the monitor and says. "With our current technology this is as small as we can make the device. We can scale the technology up as large as we require. However shrinking it beyond this point poses some problems."
I congratulate her and her team on a job well done. And encourage them to keep up the good work.
As I leave, I also make note to give each of them bonuses, they've done exemplary work. I also remind myself that I'm gonna need to start building the framework for that branch company sooner than I expected.
I also get copies of the designs for personal memorization and study.
In my past life I read many stories where someone goes into a different world and tries to build a civilization only to not remember how things are made or how they're supposed to work.
These individuals spend the bulk of their time, lamenting not having books and manuals on how things work and have to make do with what they actually have available to them. As well as always not optimizing what they actually do have available to them. I continuously remind myself (knowledge is power). So my private time is spent mostly accumulating vast libraries of knowledge.
Also in preparation for YGGDRASIL I've taken to playing some of the lesser-known MMO games, usually revolving around military strategy, martial arts and Kingdom or Empire building.
[[[ That's the actual end for this ark. Next there will be a time skip with the MC being in the game world. ]]]