Forty Five

In the morning, Bird brought Fyndraxis down to the lodge to be with Solomon for another physics symposium. This was not something that Fyndraxis dreaded exactly, but the fact that he had to be somewhere under the orders of a self appointed regent rubbed him the wrong way. He felt like he was in day care, but it was unclear as to whether he was the one being taken care of, or he was the one doing the watching.
He surmised that Bird, being Bird, had found it as a convenient excuse to get both Fyndraxis and Solomon out of her hair for a little bit so that she could do whatever she pleased for a couple hours a day. He didn’t begrudge her this freedom, but everyday on the walk down to the lodge, he felt like a petulant child reluctantly being made to ride the bus so he could spend his day coloring or learning how to share. Neither Daemons or old men, of which he was both, were known for their enthusiasm for circumstances such as these.
A couple of weeks passed in this manner. He would spend his mornings with Solomon, discussing physics and the encroachment of the threats to the east. After that he would have a lunch meeting with Terra to discuss logistics regarding the Wendigo project. Sometimes Bird would attend these meetings, and sometimes she was off doing her own thing. Solomon would also attend every once in a while and plead his case to Pavel for an orbital strike on his neighbors to the east. Vehemently reluctant would be a gentle way to describe Pavel’s thoughts on the matter.
A couple of hours were killed in the afternoon working on things like Fyndrix or a piece of software for the Wendigo project. In the late afternoon Aprés would happen, and Bird would usually attend, sometimes with Fyndraxis in tow depending on whether he was busy or not. Evenings were devoted to listening to the progress of his hunters and their growing numbers.
By the end of this couple of weeks he had a couple of hundred thousand units, which sounds like a lot, but really wasn’t all that many. If they were gathered into a spherical volume, they would be about the size of a very healthy tangerine. They were not all in one coherent mass though, they wandered the forest like a fog, seeking their prey. He was planning on recalling them when their numbers reached something in the millions. With that number of hunters, he could begin to do all sorts of wonderful things.
He was planning on crafting Bird a set of armor that would shield her from the radiation that was produced when he was used as cutlery. The armor he was envisioning would live in a little pouch on her belt or something to that effect. When it was activated, all of the little hunters would burst forth from the bag and crawl over Bird’s body. When she was sufficiently encased by this mass, all of the little hunters would join hands and try to close up any gaps that could let radiation through.
This posed a couple of problems that he was using his afternoons to puzzle out. There were places on her body that she would not want these, namely her eyes, mouth, and other unmentionables that one could probably take a pretty good guess at. The hunters would have to be able to recognise where they were on her body and adjust accordingly. The mouth could be covered pretty easily with an intimidating mask, and the other unmentionables were usually covered by clothes so that wasn’t all that big of a deal, but the eyes posed a problem that he couldn’t seem to figure out.
The problem with them was she needed to be able to see. Leaving her eyes bare and exposed would not be a suitable solution. The gamma rays that were emitted during prolonged use of the sword would fry them right out. Covering them and coming up with some sort of display inside the mask was a technical challenge that both Fyndraxis and his hunters were woefully unequipped for.
The Hunters sensed the world with a suite of chemical sensors that were very precise. Spatial data was gathered with laser range finding that built up a picture of the world around it. They didn’t have anything onboard that could be considered a camera. Even if he arranged them in an array covering her eyes and somehow rigged up some kind of screen to convey the data that they gathered, it would still just be data relating to how far away things are.
Human eyes aren’t all that good at collecting data regarding depth of field, that’s why we have two of them. Each eye takes a picture and our brain compares them on the fly to generate a coherent spatial map of what is in front of our face. It then remembers this map and updates it as we go about our day. If Bird was fed purely monochromatic spatial data, she would quickly get confused and frustrated. What he needed was something that let through visible light but was opaque to gamma rays.
There were certain classes of glass that did this, but he didn’t know how to make them or what they were even called. If he had access to his Von Neumann printer he could undoubtedly print something out that would work, but that thing was probably buried somewhere in the woods to the south, lost to the sands of time. As useful as something like that would be, who knew if it still worked and getting power to it would be a challenge that he didn’t even know where to begin on.
All that being said, from the neck down, the armor seemed to be a pretty good concept. He had whipped up a simulation of it in some software made for a similar purpose. So on paper it worked. When it came time to actually test it, he would do so on something inanimate, like himself for instance. Given the rate that his hunters were gathering new recruits, that would probably be a couple more weeks.