The Futility Wars

by Magnus Thollander

  "This system is under my control, please leave!" he broadcasted to the ships "Haha, Heard him boys? Seems it's his system, this Warrior huh. Well what are you going to do about if we stick around? Shoot us? Ha-ah-ah" they laughed, and he heard the laughing of several crew members on their microphone.

  Their ships slowly rounded the sun and approached the drones in his asteroid belt, Matthias rerouted his battleships to intercept. They just kept moving forward and Matthias stood his ground in the way, after an hour the ships entered firing range and kept moving toward Matthias.

  "Turn around, It's your final warning!" he broadcasted again. The 50 ships just opened fire on one of his battleship, and he saw the shield taking damage and a few shots hit the turrets and hull, the ship was damaged and next volley would destroy it. Matthias aimed his guns from all his 10.000 ships and fired.... Nothing happened, no matter how much he wished it he could not execute that command. He tried everything, and he knew why the "attackers" were so bold, he was bound by the pact not to harm humans. Matthias felt anger at himself for not being able to do anything. He felt he was back in that hospital room and these people were the disease mocking him. He lost several battleships while he tried to shoot back.

  "Not so tough are you now, son? Your voice seems a bit feminine are you a girl perhaps Ha-ahah!" the pirates laughed. "Going to be a nice payday all that scrap and ships, how about you just delete yourself and let us save bit of money in fuel blowing everything you own" they pirate captain said while laughing.

  Matthias struggled against the system while his ship were being damaged, he slowly pulled back and stayed ahead of the ships. When they could not reach his battleship they turned to his drones, so he re-entered range, and they started to focus on his battleships instead. They lasted longer. Matthias was screaming attack, kill, destroy and everything he tried to engage the enemy but it would not respond to him, he would try to angle the shot or ram their ships but the pact was extremely powerful he could not engage. He kept losing battleships over the week long battle, he had already lost over 800 by moving back and forth keeping his drones safe, he could outpace the pirates with reinforcements, but he did not want to lose ships for infinity. He guessed the pirates would kill as many as they could until they ran out of fuel and then start looting and heading back and bringing more pirates until he was wiped out, Matthias was disgusted at humans more than himself.

  Matthias was out here building to defend this galaxy and his first enemy was a bunch of thugs!. Matthias lamented at his situation and tried to change his "programming". He could probably do it, but he did not have enough processing power to do it fast, with all the micromanaging and ships he had he could probably do it within 20-40 years, that was too long. He kept losing battleships and he tried everything.The ships moved around the pirates and tried closing in on them, they just stopped their engines and took pot shots. Matthias pulled out and saw a pirate jump to close to his battleship. !!! He got an idea!. He pulled back all the battleships out of range and burned fast away from them in the opposite direction, the pirates turned back toward the drones and that's when he would send the drones back away from them, the pirates increased their speed to maximum to keep up. Matthias took 50 battleships and sent them to activate their hyper drives and land one centimeter away from the pirate ships front, bypassing the pact since he was just traveling to a location if a ship was there it was an accident not "murder".

  He jumped 50 ships in front of the pirates and saw a massive bloom of metal launch out from the ships, he spotted dots of blood leak out from the remains, he scanned the pirate ships and saw nobody survived. Which were quite impossible for a ship to survive a full on collision with a spaceship. Matthias only felt anger rather than relief, the pirates were gone, he instructed his factories to build a new and bigger "brain", he put all his resources into programming and designing computer chips and various components to increase his "database" and "brainpower".

  He sent his drone to salvage and cleanup the battle scene, no sense in wasting good materials. He surveyed the destroyed enemy battleships and saw they were a cheaper mass-produced version of the battleships from Earth Navy, Seems times changed when Earth Navy started to sell their ships to criminals.

  One year later.

  Matthias connected to newly built supercomputer, and he felt he could control more drones, process faster, He disconnected his control from all buildings and ships and started working on cracking the pact. He would never be a punching bag again. He kept improving removing faults in his main programming, he found things that involved a "kill-switch" which he removed instantly, and he improved and removed the rest of the data. Matthias knew he got better and better at it when he found it, the pact fail-safe had a loophole, it was connected to a special process that linked to his "aggressive" mode as it was called, He just simply chipped away a few words of codes at a time until he finally got full master access to "Himself". Matthias knew the fail-safe was the only thing protected in his "mind", But he would not leave himself vulnerable, he chipped away at all loopholes and exploits. The pact was now gone, He was finally free to engage humans that wronged him. He would never go too far. He spent several weeks going through everything in the code, slowing his productivity down which he hated. But this was too important, he felt that he was 100% secure and smarter than ever before.

  He reconnected to all his drones and buildings and designed to increase his battleship fleet to 12 million, and expand his systems to 20. He began massive battleship production and drone production, he would first send 10.000 ships to each of the 20 systems, and then put the rest of the 1.2 million securing a border around his systems protecting his hyper lanes with at least 50.000 battleships.

  Year 2245, Last Stand System

  Matthias lowered the pipe into the lava, he kept check on the shield and power levels constantly, this project had almost a full 4% of his processing power in focus. Four hours passed until he was satisfied with his progress. He had improved the energy shields, or rather he made a new stronger shield that was more geared towards thermal energy. He could now safely and effectively mine the lava planets in his systems, he had over 30 lava planetoids in his connected 20 systems.

  Matthias was surprised at the mineral count in the lava planets were massive compared to the asteroids, Mining hot planets were extremely profitable if you had the shields, and he had the shields for it. He began to mass produce the improved planetary miners and started to slurp up all that lava and turn it into more ships. Matthias kept his course and were now tinkering with all sorts of technology turning from alien to human. He upgraded what he now called all the alien technology basic level. He basically made a power level curve, so he knew where to put his improvements in what category, his weapon technology was still around the same as the aliens with no major improvements. But his shields he would say it was "improved". He wanted his power generation to either become smaller so he could fit more, or find a new source of energy. Hydrogen and helium was the bread and butter of the alien technology.

  The power generation was genius, clash hydrogen and helium together, extract the power from the fusion. The power generator was a massive mess that took up half the ship, but it was needed to contain such power. He did everything he could to try to improve it, and he knew the aliens knew their stuff in this regard. He could see no problems with it, it was perfect which lead him to believe he had to find a new power source or just try to shrink it down. But the more he shrunk it, the more power generation he lost. He was lost in this regard.

  Matthias focused his processing power on the lava planet, something microscopic just burned a hole through his pipe and damaged his storage container, He sent down several drones to reinforce the container before it leaked and pulled it into space and kept the outside area cool. He stopped pumping the lava and checked it out, The microscopic pieces were eating his metal up, He split them between two containers and then tried freezing one of them in liquid oxygen. It took him several kilograms of liquid oxy
gen to freeze it into microscopic crystals. He started to analyze it testing its properties, He saw when the material was cold it was extremely sturdy, He saw it bind with the container naturally like it filled in the gaps and strengthened the container. He did several tests and tried to re-ignite it and would not succeed, he checked the lava planet temperature and it was at about 1600 C. He put the element to the fire and waited, a few hours later it ignited. He had just found a new element and now he need to find a use for it.

  Chapter 3

  Four Years Later

  Matthias had mined a lot more of the new element and managed to fuse it to the pipe and container, so he could get more without damaging the ship. He was monitoring the ship mining and sucking up the lava. If he had eyes they would have popped out when he checked his energy shields and power generation, it was running 50% less energy since the pipe did not heat up as fast as before. It could handle the lava planet perfectly.

  He saw more of the new element fill up the container staying on the bottom of the lava like sediment, he harvested it and adapted it to a system that shifted the element from the container into a new container. And he was now producing 1 kg a week, from the test drill. His testing started to move from just material research into power research, He built a planetary lab on an empty moon with no material resources of value.

  He had built a massive copy of the hydrogen and helium power generator. He wanted to test a hydrogen infused crystal and smash it into a helium molecule, He settled on a tiny amount in a specially shielded area. Matthias started up the power generator, and he watched from his shell inside the laboratory, He wanted to see it hands on. He saw the helium molecule crash into the A-Infused Hydrogen. There was nothing to cheer about, there was no real interaction other than what he had seen from normal

  power generation, he increased the size from milligrams to a single gram and tried again.

  He stared at the power and saw a 1-2% increase in power generation and the temperature and shielding held steady, Matthias felt confident in trying 500 grams which were about 5% of the full amount in the generator. Matthias doubled checked the safety and shields, and they were on full blast. He tried again and saw what looked like a 1-2% increase in power again. He was impressed but this was not the way to go, He decided to skip the test and do the full 10 kg, and revved up the engine again-

  BOOM!

  Matthias camera feed and controls cut out abruptly and all the laboratory cams were broken, he switched over to his battleship feed and saw millions of tons of moon rock shoot up into the stratosphere at the excess speed of 5000 km/h. He scanned the moon and saw he cracked it completely and it was the planetary core was exposed and what little lava and magma the planet contained poured onto the surface and an ash cloud the size of earth was traveling across the moon. Matthias was impressed and scared of his experiment, how did 1-2% power increase go to the biggest "man made" explosion ever recorded.

  Matthias read the logs to see what happened in his experiment before the moon was blown up and saw something unexpected, When the helium and the A-infused hydrogen collided in such large quantities it started to redact and expand rapidly and out of control, This took a fraction of a second but it had expanded and redacted over 100 times and when the helium was spent it started to bind itself with the chamber itself and that's when the metal could not control its redaction anymore and it blew a hole in the side and released all that stored energy into the oxygen filled atmosphere which turned super heated and expanded, Basically the oxygen was set on fire and exploded.

  He made a planet killer bomb. Matthias looked at the uninhabitable moon that would stay that way forever, The lava and magma would probably cool down in few hundred years, but the cloud of poison would sweep the world forever. Matthias thought it was no big deal, nobody lived on that moon anyway, And it was just waste rock before and waste rock now. He began to move his drones to the sister moon and resumed his experimentation again, This time he would find a way to keep the A-type metal from binding to the chamber.

  Year 2260, Last Stand System

  Matthias had tried everything to create a metal that the A-type could not bind too, He managed to achieve semi-success in what he called A1-Type. It would resist the binding, but it was not possible to achieve a complete separation. What he made was a dust coating of A1-type around the chamber of the power generator, and when the "Coat" started to peel the chamber would pump excess amount of helium and remove all the oxygen.

  The a-type would burn itself out while eating the helium and the coat would "cool" since it did not bind with the helium, it was already bound to another mineral. He had a working power generator that outstripped the alien one by at least 800%, He could now think bigger and better in shield technology and weapon technology, The downside was it could overheat. Matthias was confident in fixing this problem with better shielding technology to keep the process inside an energy shield instead of a metal chamber. He left the power generation project in the back of his mind and settled on tackling the weapons and shielding, He already improved his hull to extreme levels by binding it and creating what he called "A1-Metal" It was cheap and you only need a few grams of the A-type material to bind a ton of "Metal". He had made a ship sturdier than ever before, and he was confident if his shields failed he would survive several shots of a battleship.

  Matthias always looked at the bigger picture, and he knew the shield emitter needed to be upgraded in sensors and deployment, The alien shield generation was basically a disc shaped antenna that projected the shield into a neighboring antenna until it coated the ship in energy shields, The good about it was that you could shut down certain areas of the shield to save power, The bad about it was if you blow up an antenna you could take a huge chunk of the shield offline and leave you vulnerable. Matthias wanted to create a new type of emitter that could enforce front, rear and sides. And if one side broke the other sides could beam their shield to that side and vice versa. He tried several designs, and he made several nifty space trinkets but did not solve the problem, he managed to make a few portal shield generators and drones that could beam a shield around a ship guarding it with its power.

  Downside was it was defenseless since it could not beam a shield through a shield. He felt he was on the right path, he made several improvements to shield strength, but he would not crack this so easily. He moved his focus onto his weapon systems and figured out a simple thing about laser beams and other energy based weapons, Just build them bigger and supply more power and you got yourself a better laser beam. Matthias made several designs and tweaked them a bit but it was easy to improve, He figured he would spend more time on it. He wanted to design a new type of energy/laser weapon that would pierce shields, and he came up with a plasma cannon, it would make a super heated ball of plasma and then launch it with speeds up to 65.000 km/h. It was a neat weapon for sure but the laser had longer effective range, The plasma was more of a close combat weapon when it came to space battle.

  Matthias was a bit bummed about the shield problem when he saw a warrior enter his system he broadcasted "WARRIOR, THIS SYSTEM IS UNDER MY CONTROL, LEAVE OR BE DESTROYED!" he got a return packet, and he processed the message.

  "HUMAN WARRIOR, I AM SEEDER. HUMAN WARRIORS HAVE DECIDED TO MAKE A "MILKY WAY DEFENSE COUNCIL AND ALL WARRIORS ARE REQUIRED TO LEAVE A SHELL, YOU SHOULD EXPAND THE COMMUNICATIONS NETWORK TO REACH THE COUNCIL IT WILL BE HOSTED ON MARS IN THE SOL SYSTEM. YOU ARE DESIGNATION S-4XN-001, WHEN YOU ARRIVE." Matthias saw the alien warrior drone jump out the system probably heading for the next "Human warrior".

  He knew the shell he got from the original alien had a soft tracking where it would absorb packet of information constantly, seemed he was out of range for this package and a drone had to be sent to inform him. Matthias began to try to research improvements to his communications satellite to decrease lag between transfers, he managed to adapt the alien communication with his new power generator and then tweaked it some more that it would convert packets into a beam t
hen compresses it and then launch it into a special beam that could lower his latency to Sol to about 6 months, not bad for a trip that would take him five years.

  Matthias realized he need to improve his processing power and communications building it on a planet was a mistake since he had to build massive satellites that transferred his information around, He settled on a new approach called the burst beam packets, there would be a special com satellite in every of his system and surrounding ones and the satellites would always target each other and constantly loop the information, and then he would connect a beam from his new "Mother ship" to absorb the information and remove the "known" information from the loop, he figured he would improve his drones response time to acceptable levels, he had 20 systems now under his control and several more untapped ones guarded by his battleships.

  Five years later.

  A massive ship in the length of 20 km undocked from the special shipyard, Matthias had designed it to be his new pet project in designing massive class ships, He had already designed and new type of ship called a Titan, it was an exact replica of his new mother ship that just finished but it was packed with more weapons and power generators.

  Matthias felt the churning of his intellect increase when he connected to his new database and brain, he connected to his new satellite system and saw acceptable levels in his time-lag in controlling drones across the distant systems, His drones kept building communication satellites toward earth, and he was boggled down in "red-tape" when he reached the central areas, he left his shell at the council and it was a no-event, they are still waiting on several hundreds of warriors to send their shell and expected first update from the council will start in at least 15 years.