Chapter 610: Iterations

Most mech technicians would have started with the rings.

They were the obvious brains of the design, the points that would interface directly with Grey’s fingers, Neural Frame, and Prometheus, so building outward from them would have been the conventional path.

Grey ignored that almost immediately, deciding instead that there was no point designing the easy part before he knew whether the chains themselves could actually work.

Those chains were where his entire idea lived or died.

The four representing Grey’s Neural Frame Types were already complicated enough, but even they were only preparation for the fifth one. If Grey couldn’t figure out how to flatten his own Frames into something as simple as a line of linked metal, then trying to represent Prometheus would be nothing more than drawing pretty bullshit and hoping the Genesis System was impressed.

Grey pulled up a three-dimensional model of his Neural Frame, drawing it out in space and staring at it for several seconds.

A Neural Frame was essentially a nervous system fed steroids, cocaine, and several generations of alien science, with countless tiny branches splitting outward from larger pathways before looping, reconnecting, dividing again, and interacting through structures Grey still only partially understood. Taking something like that and representing it with one chain sounded ridiculous when every visible link would naturally suggest only two connections, one forward and one back.

Linear was straightforward enough. The entire point of the Frame was directing things toward an end, so Grey could arrange the hidden circuits to favor forward transmission and keep most of the secondary pathways subordinate to that direction. Resonant, Recursive, and Branching were where the problem became annoying, especially when their structures could behave completely differently depending on how signals entered them.

Grey’s fingers stopped moving. Then his eyes narrowed.

"What if the chain is only two-dimensional from the outside?"

That was obvious enough to annoy him once he thought of it.

Each link could look simple while hiding an entire network of circuits inside its body, with logic gates deciding where energy travelled based on how Grey activated it.

A single chain link didn’t need to represent one fixed pathway at all, it could represent hundreds or thousands of potential states depending on which gates were open, what cadence the signal arrived at, how much energy flowed through it, and which neighboring link answered first.

Grey’s hands immediately started moving through the air.

Faint blue lines appeared in front of him as he drew out the first version, each link containing a dense internal arrangement of gates and miniature channels. From the outside, the chain remained one continuous line, but functionally it could behave like a branching network, a recursive loop, a resonant web, or a focused linear path depending on how Grey instructed the circuits to respond.

That solved the dimensional problem, but it also created about a thousand new ones.

Grey finished the first version, stared at it for several seconds, then shook his head. "No."

He wiped his hand across the air and erased half the blueprint before beginning again.

The first logic gate arrangement technically worked, which was exactly why Grey didn’t trust it. If he settled for the first functional solution, there was a good chance he would trap himself inside an inefficient architecture and spend the rest of the build compensating for a mistake he had been too lazy to fix at the beginning.

That would be especially stupid with Prometheus involved.

Grey could always rely on Prometheus to perform absurd calculations in battle and brute-force inefficient pathways through raw processing power, but every extra calculation cost energy. If the chain could reach the same result with ten decisions instead of a thousand, then designing it badly and assuming Prometheus would cover for him was basically the mech equivalent of turning the AC on in the winter, with one of his grandad’s famous ass whoopings as the cherry on top.

So Grey started making new versions, iterating and testing.

The second design reduced unnecessary gates but created congestion near the transition points between major nodes. The third fixed that problem and introduced latency elsewhere, while the fourth became so complicated that Grey realized he had somehow recreated half the original Neural Frame inside each individual link, which was completely worthless in battle.

By the seventh attempt, the mess finally cleaned itself up.

Grey leaned back and studied the four blueprints floating in front of him, each one sharing the same basic external chain structure while behaving radically differently internally.

Linear favored progressive gates and narrow transmission paths, Resonant used synchronized parallel routes, Recursive folded signals backward through controlled loops, and Branching treated almost every junction as a possible fork without requiring every route to remain active at once.

That was much better.

Grey fed all four designs into Prometheus and let it search for inefficiencies he might have missed.

The resulting optimization bill appeared almost instantly.

[Optimization Cost: 7,200 (Blue)]

Grey’s face twisted. "Fuck me."

Grey paid it anyway, watching the four designs refine themselves until tiny redundancies disappeared and several pathways shortened by fractions he wouldn’t have noticed on his own. Seven thousand two hundred blue energy units for some digital housekeeping felt like robbery, but when he considered how much the eventual materials were going to cost, this was probably the cheap part.

He really was going to bankrupt several Empires before he finished.

At least the basic architecture was done.

The next problem was materials, which was arguably worse.

Grey needed something capable of forming impossibly small Curved Faces without becoming brittle, something delicate enough to carry microscopic logic gates while remaining strong enough to survive the amount of energy his Frames could push through them.

On top of that, the material needed enough insulating properties to completely shut down inactive pathways whenever Grey flipped certain gates closed, otherwise energy bleed would turn the entire chain into one confused mess.

Grey started opening material lists, then stopped himself.

"Before that, let’s see if I can figure out Prometheus’ chain."

He scratched the back of his head and stared at the four completed designs.

The obvious answer was to combine them.

Take Linear, Resonant, Recursive, and Branching, fuse their logic gate structures together, then let the fifth chain act as the central pathway connecting all four. On paper, that sounded exactly like what Prometheus needed.

Grey hated it almost immediately. It was way too static a solution.

The four chains represented what Grey’s Neural Frames looked like now, with their current structures, abilities, and limits. Prometheus wasn’t like that, especially if Phase IV truly meant regaining the ability to steal Divine Abilities and somehow integrate things that had never belonged to Grey in the first place.

Prometheus needed the ability to rapidly and quickly change on the fly. The first four chains didn’t "change", they just activated different paths of the same Neural Frame, but Prometheus needed to be able to become a completely new Neural Frame altogether at the flip of a hat.

Grey stared at the fifth empty chain hanging in his Cyber Space while his mind circled the same problem again and again. Fixed logic gates could imitate nearly anything once programmed properly, but if the entire internal architecture had to be rebuilt every time Prometheus stole something fundamentally new, then Grey hadn’t created an adaptive Vessel at all. It would constantly become obsolete and he’d have to rebuild it.

Grey pursed his lips and ran a hand through his hair.

This was the problem with having a badass idea before figuring out how the fuck to make it work. Still, now that he could see the shape of the problem clearly, there was no chance he was giving up on it.