Chapter 702. Pain Machine (1/2)
Just because Ves could treat the rules as air, didn't mean he should degenerate into a lawless hoodlum of a mech designer. Rules were useful to keep him on the right track. Even he had to admit that the MTA largely got things right.
The mech industry would have looked a lot more ugly if the regulating influence of the MTA hadn't come and tamed the worst impulses of mech designers and mech pilots.
However, the realization that Ves had just made pointed out that he'd benefit more if he acted like a hypocrite. It benefited him if his competitors needed to adhere to the rules and principles espoused by the MTA while he retained the freedom to pick and choose when they suited him or not. As long as he didn't get caught, he could do anything he wanted!
”And that's the other pitfall I have to be careful of if I violate the rules.”
Ves believed that the Skull Architect had come to a similar realization a long time ago. At some point, Reno Jimenez decided he was better off ignoring the rules that hindered his research.
The Senior's only mistake was to get caught while doing so.
”I have to learn from his example. If I'm doing something shady, I better not go overboard and become so unhinged that I'm unable to assess the risks of my actions.”
Ves forcefully calmed himself down. He needed to get back to business. Now that he found out he could overcome his ethical objections to this job by ignoring some of his principles entirely, he had to make use of this opportunity.
He called up the design schematics of the Evaporating Spear and went to work. He started to draft some easy corrections that didn't take too much time or resources to apply. Ves found many inefficiencies, but it galled him a bit that he needed to leave most of them alone due to lack of time to address them in a timely manner.
It was as if an entire city erupted in fire, but Ves only had the time to put out the flames in a single district before the rest burned to a crisp.
Along the way, he also started to figure out ways to address the biggest issue plaguing the mech. This required a lot more thought and ingenuity on his part. With the neural interface purposely configured to kill its own mech pilot in a tortuous fashion, Ves needed to work around this handicap and lessen its impact on Acolyte Gien.
”It's all about the input and output of data to and from the mech pilot.”
The easiest way to address this issue was to amplify the strained and garbled data transmitted by the mech pilot's overstressed brains. Due to the torture he would likely be going through, interpreting the data instructions from the mech pilot would be severely limited in detail and sophistication.
If someone dumped Ves into a vat filled with acidic solutions, Ves would probably be suffering from too much pain to design a mech at the same time. Perhaps he could manage to draw a few lines that composed a sketch of a design, but the end product wouldn't be too great.
The same applied to Acolyte Gien. With so few instructions transmitted from his brains, how could his spaceborn lancer mech act in a lifelike fashion?
Many frontline mech designs suffered from the same problems. Despite simplifying the design of the mech to only the most essential parts, their designers still grappled with the issue that many borderline cases with extremely deficient genetic aptitudes wouldn't be able to pilot their frontline mechs to a reasonable standard.
So the designers cheated in a way. They compensated for the lack of skill and expression by their crappy mech pilots through pre-programmed actions and AI-assisted movements!
For example, the act of walking a mech from point A to point B entailed billions of individual data transmissions. A neural interface that immersed a mech pilot deeply with their mech would directly lean on the mech pilot's brains to control the movements to a precise degree.
However, many frontline mechs came with a form of automation or cruise control, for a lack of a better word. Instead of relying on an untalented mech pilot to strain their minds into maintaining the movement of their mechs, they could instead send out a single command to a control AI which directed various subroutines or algorithms to move the mech forward in their stead.
The difference between a single command and a billion individual transmissions was huge!
Yet relying too much on automation came with very big caveats. A mech that offloaded more and more control to AIs began to resemble a bot rather than a mech!
”A mech that is governed more by its AIs rather than its mech pilot is as effective in battle as a bot!”
Implementing such routines shouldn't be very challenging to Ves. He had access to a library of pirates AIs and algorithms from the local database of the Church of Haatumak. Many of them seemed tailor-made for the situation at hand. This indicated to Ves that this was far from the only time they held a Redemption Duel with these limitations.
However, Ves disdained this particular solution. Watching two mechs that were essentially controlled by bots did not stoke anyone's blood. This put the considerable abilities of Acolyte Gien out of play, turning his mech into his prison both physically and mentally.
It would also disappoint the expectations of the Church. Ves figured the battle needed to be as exciting as a mech arena spectacle between two evenly-matched opponents.
Before he started though, he still needed to decide on an important matter. Should he leverage his Spirituality into reshaping the Evaporating Spear's X-Factor?
Currently, Ves sensed it was a complete mess, which wasn't unusual to mechs that passed through multiple incompetent hands.
The issue he mulled over was whether he could risk using his specialty in the midst of a hidden hand of the Five Scrolls Compact!
Ves stared at Acolyte Villis who had never once stopped staring at Ves while he sat behind the terminal.
Too dangerous!
With this strange old lady monitoring his every move, Ves feared the possibility that they might pick up a clue. The strange encounter with TekTak showed that the Church and its mother organization were one of the few entities that may be able to detect something funny.
As much as it pained Ves to keep an essential tool of his locked in his proverbial tool chest, he really did not wish to fall into the hands of these crazy cultists!