Chương 61: Chapter 60: One Piece at a Time

The gap didn't close that day. But it had edges now, and Ella started planning around them. That was her way of saying the problem was allowed to be over. The months after that ran together. Ella closed the gap her way. Along with her acolytes, she rebuilt her translator until the circle and the computer agreed on what a number was. I didn't follow the details. Andrej did, and Julien did. Not that I didn't care. I was simply busy with my own activities.

Cem's next truck brought the power our new infrastructure would soon need. Julien put the panels up along the facility's south face and wired the batteries into the corridors for the time being. He had sized the array for one sun. We had two. But it was difficult to estimate their power output until we'd actually tried it and averaged the results over a year or so. And that's how we ended up like this. The truck after that brought the compute. Server racks, on dollies, one piece at a time.

Through a doorway built for one person and a bag. It took four hours to move what a forklift could have moved in twenty minutes. But that was four hours on the other side. For us, it had taken over a week. Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon. It took a while to get everything set up, but with the new servers installed, the forty-one-minute calculation took seconds now. And with that, we could finally move the gate. Cem had found the space.

Logistics was his assignment, after all. He knew a guy, and the guy had a warehouse. A private bay. A shell company on the lease. A loading dock that faced the right way. We brought the whole thing in one block, and given how it had been managed by the previous owner, it ended up being pretty cheap. At that point Andrej and Julien had started opening and closing the gate all the week after the installation, just like kids with a new light switch.

Ella would stand to one side with her arms crossed and not touch anything. That was the whole difference. And the whole point. Andrej would key in the warehouse and run the script. Then he'd press Enter on his laptop. And the gate would open. Not onto the lot. Onto twenty meters of gray concrete. A roller door. Stacked pallets of the stuff we had yet to move to our side. And a strip light that needed a bulb. After that, the freight came in bit by bit. On a schedule, in pieces, with paperwork.

The gate held itself open all day on the facility's own feed. Nobody stood at it. Nobody had to anymore. From the gate control room, we could literally point at anywhere on the planet, and the infrastructure would do the rest on its own now. Pallets crossed the doorway one at a time. We had to adapt the steps of the stairs into a ramp to move everything in. After all... One simple example: Mara's tractor. It came across as forty-one pallets and a manual.

Tomas and Nadia had to spend a few weeks making it a tractor again. Tomas had taken machines apart his whole life. Putting one together, he said, was the same thing backwards. The farm went from a garden that had ideas to acreage. Two of them, then the pond's little sister. Lukas put in drainage he was quietly proud of. Sofia's list crossed with the trucks. The ultrasound was hers now. The MRI stayed a line item for now, though. We had yet to find someone willing to sell us that one under the counter.

As for the rest, Bill was getting good at magic, and Daphne, Sofia, and Julien had joined the lessons Ella held for them in the evenings. Daphne and I kept working on making her the official translator of our team and everyone was busy doing their own things. Naturally, Ella and I talked about our days every evening during the one intimate time we had for ourselves. In our bed.