A: Different System
Adrian flopped onto the bed that would not have seemed a luxury if he had never traveled with the Prince of Eks Corp, and stared at the ceiling above him, which was layered in delicate panels that looked like they would fracture if you stepped on them.
He tried to calculate how many circuits he could have crafted with the credits that had been spent on this space. Too many. Not enough. If only a computational system were all he needed.
If he hadn't accessed Brennant's meticulous records of the decades of attempts he had made to construct the first gravitational impeller, he would have suspected that the old man was intentionally leaving something out. Over a year of compression that had burned through enough energy to have powered every device in the solar system for years, and they had merely succeeded in pushing the materials into what was almost a black hole, but no farther.