Chapter 38: Breakthrough
Five days had passed with nothing heard from the young mech designer boy. The mech division continued without any hitch in how it normally operated.
The cadets who had just been promoted were banned from going to the training room for a week. Still, Amy persisted in searching for Alto under the guise of a morning walk.
Meanwhile, in Alto’s room, he was hard at work in the virtual fabrication room of the game. He had spent days learning from the internet the basics of working with a 3D printer and the fabrication process. His hand worked slowly but deliberately.
After his fallout a few days before, he decided to enrich himself with the knowledge he was lacking rather than force his way through the problem. This time of self-learning opened his mind to what he was missing. The working of a 3D printer was simple: it turned the fragments of the metal into a digital model where the mech designer would interact with the fragments. The 3D printer would automatically alter the fragments to react like threads, allowing the mech designer to weave them through simple but calculated means.
Alto had learned that, as a mech designer, simply creating the designs was the easy part. It was always the work of a mech designer to bring their designs to life. Through every failure, Alto would try to rectify his mistake. He would start slow until he got the hang of it. It took him half a day before he managed to create a chest piece that looked just like what he had envisioned.
The trick with working with a 3D printer was to weaken the fragments into shape and fortify them as best as possible to retain their structural integrity before they would solidify. When Alto had done his first mech piece, he almost cried for joy, but he stopped himself from that until he was done with the fabrication of his mech.
Alto realized the importance of taking breaks between his work. They helped him remain focused and reduce his mental stress. There were times he dozed off while working on the 3D printer. The mech plates he was designing were a simple one-layering; Alto could not stop imagining the horror of doing double or triple layering, where he would have to create more than one layer of the armor plate at quick intervals between each other. Luckily, it was just a single layer.
By the fifth day, Alto was done with most of the mech pieces. He would have taken more rest had he not been working on a tight schedule. He finished working on the second foot, and after one good look at the work, he discarded it immediately. The corners of it were not well done—everything had to be exactly as it was in the design.
Big corporations had machines that could do the strenuous work of fabrication, or they would use technicians. Alto wondered why the game made it manual. Sure, the game offered some auto-aid to some extent, but he felt they could go further. Alto came to the conclusion that the game did not want just anybody to come in claiming to be a mech designer. He realized how the game liked to challenge everyone that played it, whether directly or indirectly.
By the sixth day, Alto was already done with the helmet design, and that being the last thing on his plate. He would have loved to rest, but his work was far from done. He initiated the assembler machine, which was a bit easier to work. Three magnetic holographic coils hovered around each of Alto’s hands; they reacted to the movement of his hands and fingers.
They controlled what seemed like six mechanical arms out of thin air. They stretched out and took parts of the mech pieces he designed. Alto felt his mind ripping under the stress of controlling so many moving parts at once. Even when he tried to simplify it, it always put a lot of stress on him. Alto groaned as he started to put the pieces of his mech together. The arms went where they should—the front and back of the chest piece, the torso, the legs.