by E. M. Hardy
Then there was the extra thousand walkers a day from the Leizhu Swamp, Qleb Sierra, and the Underground facilities.
Martin thus fielded a grand total of two hundred thousand walkers and fifty-four androsphinxes by the end of the fifth month—an army that matched the total number of humans within the allied army.
And it just went on and on from that point onward.
The rogues originally possessed overwhelming numbers on their side, with the industrial capacity to overcome their blunted cognition and strictly-defined operational parameters. What did it matter if you lost a few hundred thousand constructs each day when you could toss in a few million more each day?
All that changed when Martin gained the ability to not only build his own pyramids but to seize and integrate rogue pyramids. Each captured pyramid increased his capability to more quickly produce constructs along with increasing the available number of constructs he could field.
By contrast, the rogues never managed to learn anything new—reacting purely on their rigid programming. Martin was immensely thankful for this limitation.
He sincerely doubted he and the allies would have held out for so long if something as intelligent as, say, a fully-functioning Custodian AI oversaw the rogues.
Traps, feints, ambushes, even simply throwing projectiles like rocks—even just one of these tactics would greatly decrease the allied army’s ability to slow down the rogue swarm.
By the end of the tenth month after regaining consciousness, Martin fielded a grand total of three million, four hundred thousand walkers as his primary assault force.
He no longer needed to limit himself to a few select zones. He spread his walkers out all over the Wastes, pushing the rogues back across hundreds of miles.
He also created a smaller army of eight hundred androsphinxes escorted by forty thousand hieracosphinxes.
This highly-mobile reactionary force served as a stopgap. They dashed to wherever the rogues tried to advance, preventing them from retaking territory that Martin already captured. This allowed the walkers to continue spreading out, to focus on their slow, methodological advance toward the rogue pyramids.
He also started understanding the collective consciousnesses guiding his two new constructs.
The consciousness guiding these constructs seemed placid, almost indifferent to its surroundings. The andros preferred plodding along at their own pace, just ambling about on the sands of the Wastes until Martin required their aid.
Once he pointed out a threat, the andros would then rush headlong into combat with their doll riders urging them onwards. And even then they did so with almost lackadaisical indifference, swatting away their smaller hieraco opponents and wrestling with their rogue counterparts.
The big androsphinxes, weirdly enough, insisted on having a doll with them wherever they went.
They loved having the dolls along to ride shotgun atop their heads. The dolls did nothing productive, just sat astride the andro heads, waving their stubby little hands up in the air.
Martin thought it strange but shrugged it off as the dolls just winning over another new batch of friends—really, really big friends.
The hieracosphinxes under his control, however, were a different story.
The collective consciousness guiding the hieracos was far more aggressive, eager to get into the fight and rip stuff up. They always rushed ahead the moment Martin turned his attention away from them, tangoing with their rogue equals in a flurry of beaks and talons.
Their ferocity and tendency to jump high into the air made them excellent at disrupting formations, getting right into the action and stirring things up. Martin could easily imagine the hieracos leaping in to sow disorder, keep his enemies unbalanced, while his other constructs struck during their panic and confusion.
They also possessed a strange sort of camaraderie with the cow-boxes.
Martin often observed idle hieracos playing with the constructs, nipping at their thick legs and avoiding the resulting bull-rush. The consciousness guiding the cow-boxes didn’t mind, viewing the whole thing as a fun and harmless way to waste some time.
And his constructs were getting more and more free time as they squeezed the rogues—all thanks to their burgeoning swarm.
The same could be said for the humans.
The exhausted men and women of the allied army had been fighting the rogues on their own for nearly two years now. They eagerly returned to their respective provinces after the eighth month when Martin could confidently hold the rogues back on his own.
After all, he now produced more than enough constructs to beat back the rogues, all without having to keep them fed and watered like the human armies.
Teams of human observers remained to oversee the systematic demolition of the rogues, which couldn’t even amass themselves in large enough numbers to directly oppose Martin’s constructs. They just kept trickling in, rushing headlong to meet a threat they didn’t realize could so easily overwhelm them.
Sure, they could still reinforce with a million constructs each day from all directions, but they now lost tens of millions of constructs a day. Martin held the clear advantage in numbers, and it was only a matter of time and tedium to beat down the rogues.
The trickling lines of rogue constructs gave Martin a convenient trail of crumbs to follow.
The big andros and smaller hieracos in his swarm were limited to a twelve-mile radius around a pyramid or obelisk, making them ideal for maintaining a defensive line against their rogue equivalents. His walkers and eyeballs, however, could still operate a hundred miles away from the nearest pyramid hooked up to Martin’s network.
The eyeballs thus traced the rogues back to their pyramids and obelisks, providing information on where the rogues massed up their forces. The walkers marched along the paths pointed out by the eyeballs, systematically dismantling the rogue andros and hieracos in their way. They would then disable the pyramids that he would later take for himself.
This was how Martin managed to push the rogue constructs so deep into the Wastes that he broke through the ring of pyramids and started encountering obelisks mixed in here and there.
He noted this point as the line where Martin initially came into contact with the rogues, where he fought his first probing battles against them. He once observed the area using his eyeballs and noticed that the rogues originally alternated between obelisks and pyramids.
They only switched over to pure pyramids at the point where he first started blocking their advance with his walkers. This must have been some sort of reaction to his attacks, where the rogues began expanding their industrial output once they encountered serious opposition.
And they would have continued steamrolling his forces if Martin hadn’t been able to subvert their pyramids, taking them over with his dolls. He thus began converting the obelisks similar to his own, encountering and disabling the occasional pyramid along the way.
He kept himself focused on the grind, demolishing rogues and disabling their control relays wherever he expanded. It was a long, grueling, and extremely tedious process, but it still needed doing.
And besides, the increased industrial output of the captured pyramids helped make the work a little bit more rewarding on his end.
So on and on he went, spreading deeper into the Wastes to clear out every rogue pyramid and obelisk he could find. He continued advancing until the sands finally ended and gave way to a lush, verdant jungle.
One that was eerily quiet, filled with greenery but devoid of any other sign of life.
No grunting, chirping, bellowing, or howling of any kind. The only noises came from the rogue constructs streaming at his swarm, which at this point came in trickles of hundreds instead of swarms of thousands.
His walkers also stumbled across numerous bones scattered all over the jungle floor. Big bones, small bones, leathery hides, tufts of fur and bundles of feathers… realization hit him then: the rogues wiped out all life within t
he jungle, sparing nothing.
This would have been the fate of Al-Taheri, of the various emirates of the Bashri Basin if he failed to push back their relentless advance. It would only be a matter of time until the rogues turned north, found some way across the treacherous Qleb Sierra to reach the lush, fertile lands of the north.
And so Martin persevered, expanding east as his constructs cleared the way. He systematically disabled the pyramids scattered throughout the jungle before sending in his dolls to capture them for himself. Numerous clay and crystal deposits within the jungle would further fuel his industrial output, allowing him to build even more pyramids and constructs than ever before.
It was the fifteenth month of his return when he finally captured the last of the rogue pyramids and tracked down the original underground facility where the rogues came from.
Chapter 17
The final rogue facility was surprisingly well-hidden within a crevice, its entrance shrouded by the shadows of two cliffs and plentiful foliage. This was why it took Martin nearly a week to find out where the last few rogue andros and hieracos were coming from.
His walkers took the lead, taking short swords and short spears from his reserves of blood-bound weapons.
The hieracosphinxes under his control were eager to rush in, but he held them back along with the bigger androsphinxes. He would much rather fight efficiently with tight formations choking off tight corridors with spears instead of wasting hieracos as they brawled their rogue counterparts one-on-one.
The hieracos expressed their displeasure through their pnevmatic connection before turning around to start harassing the cow-boxes.
Martin needn’t have worried.
The rogue hieracosphinxes attacked dumbly, mindlessly, as soon as they emerged from their production vats. No attempts at ambushes, no surprises waiting behind corners. At this point, even the scarabs under the control of that hostile Custodian posed more of a threat to his walkers than the sphinxes here.
Simple unrefined automatons, operating within the rigid confines of their programming, were no longer a threat now that Martin powered on with the overwhelming advantage in numbers and industrial output.
His walkers made quick work of the rogue hieracos and the lone androsphinx that came rushing at them from the wide hallway. They systematically cleared out the facility room by room, leaving a small team to watch over each vat as hieracos formed within them, until they eventually came across the crystal core of the facility.
His walkers stood before a tall tower of crystal, with entire sections dull and blackened from the passage of time. Entire rows of rusted metal, scorched silicon, and gummy plastic surrounded the pillar—signs of degradation brought about by millennia of neglect.
If the pillar was in pristine condition, if everything within it worked as it should… would the Custodian AI prevent its constructs from going rogue? Or would the rogues simply become more efficient in their genocidal campaign?
Martin shuddered as he thought about the question. If the rogues exhibited even the slightest hint of self-preservation, of tactical planning, there was no way he and the allied army would have won.
Even the mere act of retreating from the edge of the invisible limit of their control would have been enough to tip the scales in their favor. All they needed to do was pull back and wait for their enemies to close in before engaging.
The sphinxes would thus be able to minimize losses, continue building swarm after swarm after swarm.
This is why Martin didn’t even bother disabling the rogue core.
He believed it was the last rogue facility he had encountered so far, as no new hieracos or andros came forth to challenge his swarm of constructs.
As such, his dolls dutifully laid out a line to connect this core to the rest of his network. They poured a thin line of mud that quickly hardened and latched on to the crystalline lattice of the core and the degraded components surrounding it. Martin felt the mud seep into the rusted steel and decayed silicon, replace it with living ceramic that allowed Martin’s consciousness to fill in the gaps.
And just like that, he gained control of the last rogue facility… along with a faint link to a faraway connection.
Martin traced that link, sending a branch of his consciousness to trace the connection. That link traveled up, through the layers of rock and soil above the jungle facility and into a metal rod poking out from the forest floor.
He felt a shock of recognition as that link traveled up, up, and up—through the sky, through the clouds, and into the inky blackness of space.
“A satellite!” Martin blurted out to no one in particular, his core pulsing with excitement. His consciousness promptly connected to a Builder satellite hurtling through space, its path synchronized to remain just above the jungle facility.
The satellite itself was in sorry shape. Corroded chips, wiggling joints, exposed wires, janky solar panels… even the memory crystals contained within it were barely functioning. Radiation, space debris, and the gravitational pull of two moons—it was a testament to the Builder’s ingenuity that the thing continued to function after countless millennia.
Martin reached out to the satellite using the hardware within the rogue facility, transmitting contact signals. A weak, broken consciousness responded as he fed power to the lonely, low-orbit device—an awareness that gradually blossomed to life with each passing second.
He could not, however, detect any higher form of intelligence from the satellite. Nothing like the consciousnesses guiding his constructs, responding and replying with emotions of their own. No, the satellite’s intelligence responded more like a machine, constantly attempting to link him to an external connection.
Martin couldn’t do anything drastic with the satellite, not with its thoroughly degraded condition. He sensed components already starting to break apart from this prolonged interaction.
He took the opportunity to examine the satellite from within, a branch of his consciousness copying its layout as he did so. This information would allow his dolls to shape satellites of his own with the information he obtained from exploring its inner workings.
He would have to make tweaks here and there to accommodate a pnevmatic connection linking these satellites to his consciousness, but it was now possible for his dolls to create one from scratch.
As he further scrutinized the satellite, he discovered one surprisingly intact piece of hardware: a camera module. The device was hidden deep inside the satellite’s innards in a shielded compartment. He dared to activate the camera, which shuddered once and twice within its small box.
The camera’s lid slid open a few minutes later, granting Martin an orbital view of the glimmering green pearl before him. He peered through its lens, eager to learn more about the planet of Copsis, and found exactly what he was looking for.
Sure, the magnification features didn’t work as well because of corroded joints and a microfracture on the lens blurred the image, but the resulting picture was clear enough to let him see the planet in its entirety.
Too bad it was focused solely on his home continent.
The landmass was more or less how his eyeballs mapped it out. A long arctic tundra to the north, with the expansive plains of the Grass Sea just south of it. The lush, fertile lands of the Ren Empire revealed themselves further south of the Grass Sea, with the Isles of Taiyo to the east and the temperate jungles of the Sahaasi Dominion to its south. The Qleb Sierra bisected the continent like a massive scar, a wide band of steep, craggy mountains riddled with deep ravines.
He turned his attention to the Bashri Basin next, a relatively brown patch of sand with civilization clustered around oases and green flood plains. He also noted cities dotting the coastlines, especially at the mouths of rivers feeding out to the ocean. A wide stretch of particularly empty desert separated the Bashri Basin from what Martin had come to call the Rogue Jungle, the latter’s greenery concealing the desolation caused by the rogues.
/> As he studied the boundaries of the Rogue Jungle, he noticed just how close it came to the Qleb Sierra. So close, in fact, that he could recognize geological features located just around his core pyramid.
A few more minutes of scrutiny later, and he realized that it was the same jungle that he first encountered in his earliest days on Copsis, back when he first began exploring the world around him. The northern edges of the jungle were located just a dozen miles south of the Qleb Sierra. He still remembered his earlier expeditions, his dolls savaged by creatures the moment they broke through the mountains and waddled into the greenery.
Wondering what was going on, he sent multiple eyeballs to investigate. Partitions of his consciousness rode the eyeballs as they evaded the numerous flying creatures snapping at his constructs. They spotted the savage creatures of the jungle—an array of beasts and reptiles constantly fighting for dominance on the ground.
He even lost a couple of eyeballs to some surprisingly high-flying creatures, which swooped at them from above the sky. He had to pull his surviving eyeballs even further up after that. They saw nothing out of the ordinary… so why didn’t the rogues come this way?
His eyeballs continued surveying the landscape with the guidance from the Builder satellite, and they eventually discovered a treacherous ravine stretching from the sheer cliffs of the eastern coast all the way to the Bashri Basin.
This deep ravine was just sixty miles south from his main pyramid.
He shivered within his core, figuratively speaking, noting just how close the rogues were to his main pyramid.
The only reason they didn’t expand north, and hit his primary core, was because of this ravine splitting the jungle in two. The northern section teemed with life, with various brutal creatures clawing and biting for supremacy in their isolated patch of lush greenery.
Everything south of that ravine, however, was completely stripped of animal life.
If the rogues expanded north instead of west, if they weren’t blocked by the treacherous mountains and deep chasm within the Qleb Sierra, they would most likely have come across his main pyramid in six, maybe seven short months.