Title: “Codependent Infrastructure: The Romance of Systems—Human and Otherwise”
Interviewer: Dr. Ilona Chen, Technical Features Editor
- “T’mari, walk us through the interface retrofit—how did you get Progenitor tech to speak Earth protocols in under a week?”
- “It is pretty straightforward engineering. The V’ren have been using Progenitor tech for centuries now and have had 60 years to work on Earth’s languages. I met some creative people on my first day here, and we formulated a strategy that involved me learning a few programming languages well enough that I could use AI to build what I wanted. I am not the best in my field, but as Lord Marmaduke said when I first became his cultural envoy, I was a junior officer on a grounded ship—no assignments left to pull—so I had time. Time to dive deep.”
- “Matt, your use of keft biopolymers in rail infrastructure was described as ‘hiding the miracle inside the mundane.’ Was that always your strategy?”
- “My original plan was to use wheat straw since it is a component we know well and have been using for centuries. Keft straw doesn’t make good animal feed and gets recycled internally. When we realized the strength needed for the short stalks of keft to hold up large heads of grain, it made it ideal for use in biopolymers, and I handed samples to my team almost immediately. This was never something the V’ren used for it, but the two V’ren materials scientists I added to my team have seen even more uses for it.”
- “You both approach systems with modular elegance—are there design principles you’ve shared across cultures?”
- “The entire V’Ren philosophy is don’t make something unless you can justify three ways is beautiful and elegant, but sometimes overengineers their toys. I have met a lot of hands-on V’ren engineers, the type who are not degreed engineers but straightforward get shit done technicians who love my sometimes a hammer just needs to be a hammer philosophy. I understand, while I was in Columbia the last few days, a bunch of them have taken to wearing “Get Shit Done” T-shirts in honor of my pithy comment one day in my own shop.”
- “T’mari, how do you explain redundancy and failover to a species still healing from system collapse?”
- “I don’t. That would be arrogant, and I am also part of the get shit done crowd. I can’t tell you the number of times I have run up against entrenched engineering doctrine when I just needed to get a tool fabricated to do a simple thing and was asked, “What else does it do?” I was never so bold as Mathew to explain it was also a tool to pulverize idiot bureaucrats.”
- “Matt, why go with tethered anti-grav freight instead of the flying car dream everyone else still chases?”
- “I now have the tech to do that, and it would be fairly cheap, which makes it absolutely a nightmare. Cheap flying cars combined with human stupidity should make everyone nervous.”
- “How do you two collaborate across disciplines? Do your roles blur in the field?”
- “She is brilliant, and I am in awe of her. She isn’t just a theorist or a designer; she has mad hands-on skills. When she thought her engineer was being stingy with resources, she walked into my machine shop with a set of micromachining and electronics equipment and got to work. Four hours later, she had her first functional interface between an Earth laptop and v’ren keyboards and monitors.”
- “Since then, he has given me engineering problems I have never seen before and simply asked how I would solve them. This has sort of been a game for us. Along the way, we have actually come up with some really useful engineering projects. We have started integrated teams working on several of those projects.”
- “The composite rail line pilot in Saline County is rumored to cost half the energy of a maglev system. Can you confirm?”
- “Absolutely, I can confirm, though it is more like 5% on a ton-for-ton basis. The V’ren trust is keeping this tech held tight, but we will be licensing the units in multiple sizes. Big units require big fabricators. Those fabricators are massive power sinks—especially without a star drive.”
- “Last question: What’s the biggest engineering challenge still ahead of you—and how will you solve it together?”
- “I think he just said it, the bottlenecks of too little fabrication capacity. We can get there, but growth is slow. There is no tech in the galaxy that will make that go any faster. Every time we divert power or fabrication capacity from creating more power and fabrication capacity, we slow down or even slide backwards on other projects.”
