Shoot, why not cobble together some kind of metal detector? Those things were simple enough.
Thankfully, with subroutines in fabrication and analysis, my processes were up to the task. Two feedstock and ten minutes later, I had a simple metal detector…
…and no way to carry it around and use the damn thing. I cursed at my simplicity. Then I dissolved it back into components. Tying it to a drone would eat up bandwidth… which I needed for rooms. No, I’d have to solve this problem later, sleep on it.
And I did have a nap coming. I was looking forward to it. The corruption was still set deep within me, and I found myself stuttering, chasing thoughts. For all that it was diminishing, it wasn’t going fast or easy.
Alright then. I gave the swarm its marching orders. They dug two tunnels out on the same wall as the elevator shaft, stretching back. I experimented and found that up to fifteen feet, they were essentially free. After that, I had from fifteen feet to about fifty to play with before the bandwidth cost rose. These would be good trap corridors and kill zones for me. I pushed them out to their full fifty feet and tunneled out a large room beyond. About the size of my core chamber, this one would be my new throne, more or less. It also ate up three units of bandwidth. I toyed with the notion of going even larger and decided against it. I’d come up with an idea while I worked, and needed that point left over if I wanted to have a chance of success with it.
Truthfully I could have gotten away with one tunnel, but again, symmetry appealed to me.
I claimed the tunnels, claimed the room, and sighed as my resonance flowed a bit more freely. After that there was nothing to do but brief Argus on his role in things.
The little guy listened attentively, offering suggestions as he dared. I took the ones that made sense.
And then, shortly after nightfall, my resonance coalesced and freed up the last circuit I needed for Stage Two.
I sunk it without hesitation into the Databases subroutine and watched with grim satisfaction as words traced across my viewpoint.
You have unlocked a Research Improvement!
Three options are available at this @$$#$@#@#ffff error
Loading module Junopatch 633.41
#Patchnotes – I made some modifications. Given our current deplorable situation, these are a bit more useful than the old ones. Have fun, kids.
This was a surprise… maybe not a welcome one. I watched new words crawl up the view.
The following three options are available, given your current development and actions to date
Oldtech – Due to your reclamation of ruined structures or parts thereof, you may specialize in researching human pre-war technology. Also assists with reverse engineering such items.
Omnibiologist – Due to your interaction with non-human organisms both benign and hostile, you may specialize in researching aliens, mutants, and artificial life forms.
Warden – Due to your expertise at quelling riots and housing prisoners, you may specialize in research concerning new schemas for the purposes of capturing, containing, and restraining living creatures.
I stared at the options. “Argus? Use my eyes for a few seconds, then go back. Tell me what’s going on, here.”
Argus did. “What do you mean?”
“These options are personalized.”
“Yes. Past a certain point, the system starts trying to anticipate you. It starts shaping its improvements to the activities you’ve done and the improvements you’re taking. Warden is probably on there because you took manhunter, imprisoned the mutant, and fended off something the system interpreted as a riot. It thinks you’re trying to be something like a prison core.”
“Alright. But…” Something else up there had caught my eye. That one bit in Omnibiologist. “Aliens.”
“Yes?”
“There are aliens?”
“Mmmmaybe?”
“Argus…”
“I don’t know much about it. I know that we got out into the stars, so presumably we met aliens. Things my other assignments have said, and things that Juno said seem to indicate that.”
Cade had mentioned a Starport.
“Are there any on Earth?”
“Mmmmmmaybe?”
I sighed.
This. This was a tough choice.
From what I’d gleaned from earlier conversations with Argus, the Cores came preloaded with a good assortment of generic devices. But they didn’t have everything. As a standard core, I wouldn’t have access to military-grade technology or some restricted items. Even if I built up the subroutines to get around the restrictions, I simply wouldn’t have the blueprints in memory. I’d either have to obtain them from existing databases or research them.
And going by that, Warden was probably my best shot at getting ahold of good technology quickly. More combat-capable drones and maybe even some gas-delivery systems that didn’t get treated as automatic hazards. Plus it offered nonlethal options for dealing with people (and creatures) I wanted to keep alive. Furthermore, it had a synergy with Manhunter that I couldn’t deny. But…
Oldtech specialization would help me reverse engineer stuff I came across and figure out the purpose and principles behind the remnants left around. I was sure that the tunnel below the elevator shaft had oldtech down there, and once I got exploration drones going, then I could probably find some outside. If I DID stumble across military tech out there, then this option would let me reverse engineer it faster.
And then there was Omnibiologist. Not as clear-cut as the other two but with possibly more potential. It all depended on what was out there. If there WERE aliens, then it would help with them. It would also help me deal with the Tazzel Worm, possibly figure out a way to decontaminate it of its rogue nanostrains, maybe even train it. And it seemed to help with artificial intelligences, too. Not really biology there… or was it? The stuff my core was made of could be partially biological, for all I knew. There was an image; brain dust, lightly smoked. Only twenty-three percent corrupt, goes down smooth!
I blamed the giddiness on corruption. But honestly, having three good options available seemed to be a reason for my wandering whimsy.
I thought hard, I thought long, and as Argus hovered, I made my choice.
Warden was good, but I wasn’t a prison. If things worked out, and I could trust the Arcadians, then I’d be a refuge. And as far as nonlethal measures went, well, I wasn’t feeling it. Hadn’t run into any enemies I needed to take alive, yet.
Oldtech was potentially powerful, but it was a gamble. And I could reverse engineer stuff without it, if it came to it. Besides, if aliens WERE on the table, then if I got any of their tech, Oldtech wouldn’t help there. What’s more, my biggest threat at this point didn’t seem to have much in the way of oldtech, homemade dynamite notwithstanding.
That left Omnibiologist, and while it was also a gamble, it was less of one. I had mutant bats I could study, and so long as the Tazzel Worm didn’t shove off this mortal coil too early, I had him, too. Hell, I could study his corpse if it came down to it, for that matter. But the main part that sold me on it was the “artificial life” component. Something I could use against Juno, maybe? Maybe. I hadn’t forgotten that she was ultimately an antagonist, here. No matter how our goals coincided, I couldn’t trust her so long as she held my memory captive.
Omnibiologist it was.
“Get ready. Move the chamber as soon as I’m out. Then start on Phase Two.”
“Yes sir!” Argus bobbed.
I confirmed my choice and sank into darkness. As I did, the sudden thought came to me that I should name that Tazzel Worm. But before any ideas could come to me, I was gone…
FOURTEEN
Consciousness returned and with it, pain. Pain in every fiber of me, pain filling and ripping through me, and I screamed, loud and long.
And then, like it had never been, it was gone. “What?” I asked Argus, feeling like my voice should be about ten octaves lower.
“I, ah, are you okay?”
/>
“What was that?”
“I think it was the core trying to purge a corrupted sector. Check the logs, see if there’s any mention of it.”
I did. It amounted to a whole lot of machine code, quite a few
This was getting old.
And a glance at the timestamp showed that I’d been out about a day, long enough to pile up another circuit. No, with active enemies after my dusty shell, I couldn’t keep losing time to corruption every time I slotted an improvement. I’d have to get this taken care of sooner, rather than later.
The problem was that it wouldn’t be easy. Juno had given me a schema to take care of the corruption, but it required a few subroutines at rank three. That would take over a week to whip up and detract from the planned defenses. My enemies were going to strike me sometime inside that week, unless I got lucky or they got incompetent. No, I had to gear up to face them first. I couldn’t afford to be offline when they showed up.
I’d have to tough it out. Just like always.
“Alright,” I told my little eyeball ally. “Talk to me. Any weirdness?”
“No, not a bit. Moving the core chamber created a good efficiency with the broadcast node. We’re getting a bit more bandwidth out of it now. And the wormtunnels turned up the remnants of another crossbeam, so we had plenty of feedstock to work with. I’ve created doors and traps for the two corridors between here and the elevator room.”
I glanced up to the two doors leading out of my chamber and slid them open. Long stretches of corridor, cold concrete with metal tracery. Then I switched vision modes until I could make out the traps… pits, falling ceilings, and a new type, a tilting floor. Not much by itself, but when coupled with the pit traps…
I needed something for the walls and made a note to work on that.
In one of the walls, a dark hole about an inch around led into the dirt. “Is this a fresh one or a remnant?” I asked my helper.
“It’s a fresh one. Given the layout of the support beams we’ve found so far, I think there should be another around this direction.”
The wormtunnels were my idea. The smaller the tunnel, the less bandwidth I had to devote to claiming it. So a tiny tunnel, worming through the dirt, could be used to prospect for big metal beams without requiring much of a bandwidth commitment. And if it came up empty, then it could be filled back in and un-claimed without any real fuss. The goal was to find support beams or ore deposits. They could be mined out by my little nanobots, then filled back in with dirt. We had plenty of that.
“Alright,” I said, shifting my perspective to my old core chamber, which had now become the elevator room. It looked odd without monitors and terminals. The “CAUTION: UNSTABLE FLOOR!” warnings on the ceiling provided dashes of color against the gray, yellow, and black. They were impossible to miss for anyone looking up.
Which, given that the room had about twelve feet between floor and ceiling, meant that you had to be in the room to see them. Given the nature of the trap, I hoped that would be far too late for most intruders.
The trap itself was fairly evil. It was a standard pit trap in the center of the room, with a tilting floor on all sides that would drop anyone who stepped on it into the pit. There weren’t any spikes in this pit, though. No, it was simply a smooth, angled space that ran from the center of the room to the elevator shaft. Anyone who fell in the pit would have about a second of tumbling confusion, then they’d find themselves rolling into the elevator shaft, and enjoying a forty-foot drop.
Onto spikes. Because it turned out you COULD put them under an elevator, without tripping safety regulations.
I opened the elevator doors and took a peek. Yep, Argus had upsized the elevator as I’d instructed, making it an actual, full-sized cage. This was the important part of the main trick I was going for.
I was trying to sell the illusion that I’d moved my core chamber down a level.
I didn’t know what the hell was down there; it seemed dangerous to go digging, too. So my hope was to fool anyone who made it this far into poking around and wasting time with the lower level.
It wasn’t a foolproof notion; I still had the two doors to either side of the elevator shaft that led to the connecting corridors and my core chamber beyond. If I’d had Concealed Construction I could have hidden them, perhaps. As it was, given my current limitations, I didn’t have a good method of concealment. I tried imagining a few countermeasures and kept getting told I needed more subroutines than I had.
That was always what it came down to, didn’t it?
I checked the timestamp, allocated one of the free circuits I’d gained during my downtime, slotting it into Energy storage. The other one I left alone. I’d need two circuits to raise a subroutine from one to two. And if I wanted to move on to stage three, then that was the most significant part of it.
“You did well,” I told Argus. He bounced up and down with unexpected joy.
It helped to think of him as a sort of pet. A loyal dog… but he wasn’t my dog. I’d do well to remember that.
Speaking of pets and doghouses… “How about our mutant friend? How’s he been adjusting to things?”
“I ran one of the wormtunnels up to the ceiling of his chamber, as instructed. He went out around the start of nightfall. Presumably he’s still out there.”
“No trouble navigating the burrow, then?” I was initially concerned that I’d made the grade of the exit tunnel too steep. But if he was getting by fine, then it was no big deal.
“None. I’ve since sealed and filled the wormtunnel to prevent possible contamination, but it’d be easy enough to dig it out again if you want to check on him.”
I checked the time. “Not yet. If he’s here during daylight hours it means that he’ll stick around a while. Until the food’s gone, at least.”
By that time there would be more food for him, most likely.
I had a little under eighteen hours to go before my next circuit, so I sat back and thought. Language, I remembered. With all the research tree filled to the first level, I had everything I needed for that.
Assembling the translator program was strange. It was the first schema I had that didn’t involve hardware. As such, it didn’t cost feedstock; it only took time to code up. It turned out that I wasn’t much of a coder, but the interface pretty much walked me through it, took the high-level directives and choices I made and translated them into strings of characters, flashing by too quickly to track, even for me. Though I supposed I could slow them down and look at them, if I really wanted, but why bother? This wasn’t my specialty.
What was my specialty?
It wasn’t medicine, for all that I had medical skill. It wasn’t military, for all that I knew the difference between good soldiering and bad soldiering.
About the only other strength I’d noticed was a propensity for being a fairly ruthless and dirty-fighting bastard. Which had gotten me this far so I couldn’t really disparage it. But it did make me wonder.
The software compiler finished its work. Argus looked it over and nodded. “It’s small enough it shouldn’t tie you up that much. Some larger programs can cause bandwidth issues. This one shouldn’t cost you anything to run. Not unless you had about a hundred others like it going.”
“So software eats up bandwidth. Good to know.” He hadn’t told me about this beforehand, but I chalked it down to an oversight, rather than malice. “No free lunches anywhere, looks like.”
I ran the translator program, feeling a tingling sensation and a somewhat expanded consciousness as it took hold. It asked for raw material, and I fed it the video logs of all my interactions with people so far. It chugged away, and I let it work. That would give it some data for a baseline, I hoped.
The rest of the day was patience. Argus kept the wormtunnel snaking around but didn’t manage to locate another support beam. At my direction he poked the wormtunnel over to the mutant’s chamber, and we
confirmed that it was curled up in a corner, sleeping.
Then night hit and with it, another circuit. The slow but gradual increase in my resonance rate was paying off. I checked the requirements, smiled without a face, and bumped up my Fabrication subroutine to two.
And then, I started work on a project I’d been wanting for a very long-time.
“What is that for?” Argus asked, peering at the plastic-coated frame that was materializing in front of my core.
“We’ve been on the back foot too long,” I said, smiling as the nanobots sculpted a pair of elegant fabric wings. “We don’t know much about the outside, save for the fact we’re on a hill, and there’s a few trees around. This is the first step toward bringing the fight to the world, instead of just sitting back and reacting.”
And with a hum, my project finished.
Aerial Surveillance Drone I has been constructed and added to your minion pool.
Bandwidth Occupied: 1
Without hesitation I jumped into it, the single vectored thrust jet in its center firing up with a thought. I flexed the wings, keeping it steady and stable, feeling the gyros compensate for my inexperience. “Argus, mind the store for a while. I’m taking this baby out for a spin.”
FIFTEEN
It took me about fifteen minutes to get the hang of controlling the drone and five minutes more to navigate it out of the tunnel. Whatever I had been, I wasn’t a pilot.
Fortunately the drone wasn’t complicated, and it was light enough to take a few spills without difficulty. After a good amount of experimentation I navigated it out into the sunlight, a vaguely oval shape with black wings flaring, catching the air as it sped out of the entryway.
Bricks caught my eye first. Fallen bricks, of some hard material that seemed a cross between concrete and plastic. Between crumbling piles of the stuff, sheet metal littered the ground, which was choked with weeds and crawling vines.
Bunker Core (Core Control Book 1) Page 14