The next day, the race was the talk of the base. It was on everyone's mind, and not even the fact that they were going to start adding to the framework and actually building what should be a functional Dyson Sphere the next day was enough to distract them from the jokes and laughter.
Max and Nico had been swarmed with people, so they hadn't really noticed, but the racer who had been knocked out on the first corner had come in second, and had not taken losing well.
He spent the whole race thinking that he was winning, and that the reckless racer who wrecked him had crashed as well and started over long after he had left. Then, when he finished the race, he realized that they had finished while he was still two thirds of the way around the course and had already logged out and rejoined the party.
The temper tantrum they had thrown on the way back to their apartment was caught on security camera, and some bored member of the security staff had blurred their faces and sent it to social media.
Unfortunately, their shirt was distinctive enough that with the timing, it hadn't taken long to find out who it was.
Max had no intentions of going out that day, just picking out a nice meal and a horror film to watch with Ranarth and Nico, who he knew were both big fans of the genre. He had underestimated their love of the horror genre, and while the dinner part of the evening had gone smoothly, it had quickly degenerated into Nico and Ranarth comparing notes on how the villain in the movie could have done better with his elaborate plan to capture and torture the hapless teenagers.
In hindsight, he should have seen that one coming.
It was the perfect event for them, and they were in a great mood to start out the new workweek, along with the happy gossips of the research team, which Max whipped into shape first thing in the morning, moving quickly through the first few component boards to get started on the actual mechanism of the Dyson Sphere.
The more they put together, the more Max remembered, and by the end of the week, he had already made notes on how to optimize the whole process for their Replicators so that the device could be theoretically mass-produced, other than the chassis, which needed to take the force of the internal nuclear reaction.
They still had to hand make the first round and individually test every component before they installed it, but they were progressing well.
On the other side of the lab, Nico and her pair of assistants had made an extensive list of possible power output technologies, ranked based on the feasibility of their production and the usefulness of the power output.
Ranarth had given them a huge amount of data to work with, but he didn't know much about it, other than the ones that they had seen more recently, so he was mostly a bystander at this point in the process, cheering on the teams as they worked.
The feasibility of making the Dyson Sphere without Dark Energy was enough to keep his constant attention, and he had done a good bit of research on the topic to verify Max's assertions that it would work, which was keeping Uncle Lu off their backs, and everyone in the other departments in fear of what they were going to be asked to refine next.
It was a good thing that they had Ranarth to deflect attention, as it took three whole weeks to finish the first prototype of the Dyson Sphere before they got to the hard part. They would have to very precisely cut a portion of a neutron star to insert into the device, and then fill it with gases and get the ignition started.
The first half would have to be done in another layer, while the next would have to be done in this one, and preferably far from any sort of outside interference.
That meant that they were going to need to go back to Koleska space, since there was nothing in the other layers here, and Ranarth had been adamant that they did not try to mess with them and accidentally imbalance the energies in this region like they were in the other.
Leaving the Moon Base was not a big deal, it wasn't like they were stuck here, but it would attract attention, and none of them wanted to get people's hopes up before they could prove that their theory was actually scientifically plausible.
It should give enough mass and therefore gravity to sustain the reaction in such a small radius, and the numbers had been triple checked, but between theory and reality there were often huge differences.
Differences that might mean a massive nuclear bomb, or an uncontrolled miniature star placed in a random location within the nebulae of the Koleska sector.
Ranarth was giving him an eager look that reminded him of a puppy whose owners had just returned home when Max finally decided it was time to take the team on the road.
"Well, are we ready to go? I'm looking forward to seeing what happens when humans try to make a Dyson Sphere again. I looked up the data from the first time, and though they were around full-sized stars, the failures were remarkable." Ranarth asked.
Indeed, they were. In Ranarth's mind, Max found memories of whole attempts at the sphere collapsing into a star and sending it supernova, a density increasing experiment from their first attempts that caused a miniature black hole, and an attempt that didn't go critical until they began to disassemble the Dyson Sphere to see where they went wrong, which led to a glorious Fusion Flare that wiped out an entire inhabited planet.
He would have to be sure he didn't make any of those mistakes himself. If he was going to mess this up, it should be in a new way.
