Tinkertech normally not replicable

“Hey, what are you doing?” he asked.

 

I was stripping the device he'd built apart and was setting all the parts neatly and in their place. But I was also pulling parts from off a shelf they'd provided and I was building something.

 

“Well,” I said. “Most of this is pretty normal tech. I'd guess that's true of most tinkertech except for the really complicated stuff. But you've taken all kinds of shortcuts here that make it work better, but make it impossible to replicate.”

 

“What do you mean?”

 

“Well, when you put this in, I assume that it was what, titanium dioxide?”

 

“Yeah,” he said.

 

“But if a regular scientist tried to rebuild this, he wouldn't get the same effect at all. I think that sometimes there are connections from one place to another made in another dimension. They can't be reverse engineered because they aren't there. I think a tinker has sensory powers he doesn't even know he has; if you were able to detect gravitational and magnetic fields for example, and you were working on something small that would be affected by those things, you'd know to wait for the exact instant that a subtle fluctuation slightly magnetizes a piece of metal. Without that slightest of changes, the design will be glitchy at best. If it was just the one piece, then they could work their way around it, but it isn't. In a dozen different places there's all these subtle changes, and it creates cascading failures that show up in different places to make it hard to figure out which pieces are malfunctioning.”

 

“That's kind of a crazy theory.”

 

“Plus, I think that powers intervene directly during the manufacturing process. They keep things from heating up that really should, or they keep things from overcooling. They cheat basically, and what I do is I can see the spots where things aren't working right, and I can figure out what should be happening.”

 

***

 

We worked for four hours, and he was finally called away.

 

“That was amazing,” Lewis said.

 

He was the lead scientist doing the filming. There was a team of them, and they'd let Kid Win do most of the questioning, for fear that they'd get my thoughts off track and ruin what I was trying to accomplish.

 

“You think so?” I asked.

 

“We wrote down some questions we had,” he said. “Could you fill them out while everything is fresh in your mind?”

 

“Sure.”

 

They set me down next to a stack of papers.

 

I filled things out as quickly as I was able, but it was still another hour before I was completely done. It looked like my entire shift had been filled in the lab

 

***

 

Sheep