"Umm... Jack?" asked Madison.
"What?" Jack said, only half paying attention.
"While you're at it, can you maybe templatize a super computer or two for me?"
"What about electricity? Those things are power hungry."
"Don't you have to solve that problem, anyway? Your lab equipment will require electricity as well. Didn't you say you can make a room with bright sunlight? Just set up a large solar array in one of those rooms."
"Good idea," he said. "Since it's your idea, you can be in charge of our soul space electric power generation. Let me know when you've identified the items we need to templatize."
"Um... okay," she said, then her physical self grabbed her laptop and began typing in search queries.
About an hour later, Madison asked him to create several rooms, so he created a new hallway leading off the white room, and added three new rooms. One was the size of a football field, one was the size of his high school gym, and one was the size of a large office. She had him put environmental controls on each. Then she had him create tubes between the three rooms using the cylindrical hallway template to act as conduits for power cables so they didn't have to worry about tripping over cables in the hallway.
After that, she would periodically interrupt him to have him templatize something, or instantiate something in a specific location. Some of the stuff she had him instantiate was too big for either of them to move, even if they worked together.
Eventually, she interrupted him by saying, "Okay, I'm ready!"
"Huh, what?" he asked, still focused on reading an article about gas chromatograph instruments.
"I'm ready to demonstrate our power plant!" she said enthusiastically.
"Really?" he asked. "That was fast."
She huffed. "Dude, it's been like ten hours!"
His physical self checked the clock on his laptop and realized it was two in the morning. Back in his soul space, he stood up and followed Madison down the hall towards the football field sized room.
He opened the door and walked inside, noticing that it was bright but cold. Spread out in a neat grid pattern were portable solar panel arrays interspersed with metal boxes. Cables connected groups of solar panels to the metal boxes and the metal boxes were then connected to an array of boxes lining one wall.
"Damn, you did all this in ten hours?" he asked.
"Yup. It would have taken way longer, but I found a company that makes equipment for emergency response. All the cables have connectors pre-attached, so all I needed to do was run the cables and plug them into the right sockets. The hardest part was figuring out the power management software. Whoever designed it assumed you were already trained as an electrical engineer. I must've spent hours looking up esoteric terms just to get it configured right."
"Right now," she continued, "we have just over one megawatt of power generation."
"What! How?"
"This room is a little over five thousand square meters. The room is configured to produce sunlight and that amounts to about one kilowatt per square meter. The solar panels are only twenty percent efficient, so five thousand times one point three times zero point two gives you one point three megawatts."
"Nice!"
"Come on," she said, then started walking towards the exit.
He followed her and they went into the room that was only basketball court sized. The lighting was more indoor bright instead of outdoor bright, and it was much colder. The room was packed with racks and racks of computers. Only one rack appeared to be on, and he was surprised at how loud it was. The fans on it made a constant droning noise.
"I only managed to get one of these set up. But when I'm done, I'll have as much compute power as some of those AI companies. And it's all free!" Then she made a "mwuhahahah," sound while rubbing her hands together like a demented villain.
"Okay..." he said. "Why?"
"Don't you get it?" she asked. "All those AI companies are spending hundreds of millions of credits on GPUs and electricity, and the engineers have to compete with each other for compute time. But I have all this to myself. For free! I have fifty thousand petaflops of compute power in this one room. If you tried to buy all these computers, it would cost you more than a billion credits."
"Shit, that much?!"
"Yep. These things are not cheap. Sure, they cost you some GP to instantiate, but it's a drop in the bucket compared to what you have. By the way, how much is it costing to run them?"
Jack checked his status.
Energy Points (EP): 1,374,230,000/1,000,000,000 :-: (7,978/sec [10,000/sec])
Genesis Points (GP): 12,058,090,314
Soul Space Cost: 2957/sec
He'd spend just over two billion EP since he got the Genesis Heart, so he'd earned two billion additional GP. As for his soul space EP costs, it looked like the new rooms were costing him just under a thousand EP per second. Almost as much as it cost for one of them to have parallel self active. Once he added in his chemistry lab, it would probably be closer to fifteen hundred or two thousand per second. Still, a thousand EP/sec to run a megawatt solar power plant and a billion credits of computer hardware seemed laughably cheap.
"It looks like all your rooms combined cost a little under a thousand per second."
"Damn!" she said.
"What?"
"All these computers combined require about nine megawatts of power. I'll need seven more solar power rooms to power all of them. You only generate ten thousand EP, and I'm sure you are not willing to dedicate all of it to just running my server farm."
"Have you considered just increasing the brightness in the solar room? I bet you could at least double the power output. I think I read somewhere that you can concentrate sunlight on a solar panel to get up to a ten times increase in power output. You just need to take care of the excess heat. Also, I think you can change the room's light spectrum to only include wavelengths that are absorbed by the solar panels to reduce heat transfer from infrared. And you could lower the temperature further and add wind circulation to keep the panels cool."
"Oh! Damn, why didn't I think of that?"
"Tunnel vision," he said sagely. "You would have thought of it, eventually."
"Maybe," she said, then he yawned.
"Damn, I just realized I'm super tired," she said.
"Yes, me too. I think I'm going to disable parallel self and get some sleep," he said, then stared meaningfully at Madison. She was like a kid at Christmas right now, and he knew she'd keep going if he didn't say something.
"Um... yeah, that sounds like a good idea. I think I'll do the same."
He just waited, staring at her.
"Umm... okay... I'm going now," she said, but did nothing.
"Don't make me-" he warned.
"Okay, okay," she said, then disappeared from his soul space.
Before he too deactivated parallel self, he edited Madison's permissions so she could not re-enter his soul space for the next ten hours. He knew her well enough to know she would probably try to sneak back in once he fell asleep. He'd seen her when she had been awake for several days and he was not interested in dealing with zombie Madison.
Back in the physical world, he got up from the couch and held out his hand. Madison looked at him puzzled for a moment, then she pouted, closed her laptop and handed it to him.
As he walked down the hallway towards his bedroom, he said, "I've locked you out for the next ten hours. Get some sleep."
Behind him, he heard her mutter, "Damn."