Now that the Createk implants were fully operational and under my command, I could really see what all the hype was about. At least for me personally. Not really for the average civilian back home. Most of the solar system was what you would call a post-scarcity economy, but still some of the more intricate tech that couldn’t (yet?) be mass-produced would need to be rationed out to an extent. Same as with real-estate. Not that it was a big problem, virtual spaces could be bigger on the inside after all. What’s a few decades, centuries, or even millennia waiting around in a literal paradise of your own making for a slice of some prime real-estate? To be honest not that many people, percentage-wise, chose to have a presence in the physical world in any case.

Nonetheless with a population in the trillions system-wide, and with most products so easily accessible, virtually or in base-reality, Createk implants weren’t very sought after. This was both good and bad. Nobody could justify starting up a whole production line of the things because next to nobody wanted to be able to exchange energy and materials for tech anywhere and everywhere, the price in resource vouchers being about the same as making the thing yourself. After all, you not only got resource vouchers that needed to be spent within a certain period of time periodically, one also got resource vouchers for recycling old tech. The very same molecular fabrication technology having been in use in larger static installations for ages now, allowing perfect recycling and reforming of broken technology. Not that tech broke all that often, but accidents happen. The real innovation of Createk’s work was the miniaturization and the somewhat lowered energy demands of the implantable version.

These implants were the domain of the true pioneers, anyone wanting to go to the less inhabited zones of the solar system would want one. Same for anyone who wanted to join one of the generation ships a few people would put together every few decades. For the real extremophiles who were not recognizably human in anything but cognition it was the first thing they saved up their resource vouchers for.

What’s more, this particular model of implant had next to no safety overrides. Upon querying the implant, it made me aware of the fact that it wouldn’t/couldn’t make gray goo or anything else that self-replicated without a set finite goal. Nothing about it told me I couldn’t kill every single living thing on this planet if I decided to make a micromachine plague. Terrifying, I’d have to write some safety routines of my own later. As under control as my emotions were in this silicon substrate of mine, I could certainly foresee myself being stricken with grief or anger enough to do something foolish in the next few millennia. It would, after all, only take a few objective-time seconds to design something as simple but devastating as said plague. Less if I really wanted to literally sterilize this planet permanently.

This line of thinking was more than a bit morbid, but highlighted the power I had to shape this world.

First things first, I had to get out of town. They could most likely offer me a lot more in the long term, but in the short term I had all that I needed inside and around my bones. The minimum amount of manufacturing capacity to start extracting resources and building. The medical scanner couldn’t help much with identifying where there was ore, but I could, after all, just start digging almost anywhere and I’d eventually have enough resources to do what I wanted to do. This wasn’t efficient, but I could always amp down cognition until the process was done. One of the first things I needed was a reliable source of power, modern photovoltaics being efficient, but not “build a secret base on an alien planet by yourself in a reasonable amount of time” -efficient. Not at the scale of a single human skin anyway.

So, the current plan was to bootstrap onto larger power supplies via photovoltaics. I’d make a few primivite-ish solar panels, seeing as they require the least amount of truly exotic materials. I could make some wind turbines but those aren’t exactly inconspicuous and they require large amounts of conductive metals and perhaps some rare earths. The reason I wasn’t jumping straight to something like fusion power was the requirement of a rather large quantity of beryllium. Several kilos in any case for a smallish-scale reactor.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

So I set out, I didn’t see many people on the streets but the ones I did see seemed to treat me with much less apprehension now that I wasn’t naked and covered in strange-looking wounds.

Outside the gates first, a couple guardsmen hindered my path for a few minutes as I asked them to open said gates. A helpful bunch, as they did so without much fuss. Probably just happy to see me gone. Foolish mortals. If only you knew of my true power. I jokingly thought in passing, bringing a bit of a smile to my lips. Some levity should be allowed. I took the happy joking thought as a good sign of my substrate settling down, the silicon I ingested earlier helping with tuning myself down a bit.

So I picked a direction, started walking, didn’t stop, and tuned down my cognition. A few days of continuous travel later I deemed myself to be far enough away from civilization that I could start some small-scale construction experiments.

I set up some AI processing to automate bootstrapping of an energy and material store underground. It would make a good deal of sense to build everything I could underground, so as to not rouse as much suspicion if some traveler did somehow come across my little base of operations. Not that I could build solar panels underground and expect them to do me any good.

Mining would be done by a mixture of micromachines and more traditional shoveling. Micromachines would separate the valuable materials from what I was loosely calling ore, while some macro-scale machines would take care of the actual digging through massive amounts of soil part.

After an embarrassingly long time, I had built a functioning, if small, prototype of what would be doing the main digging. A kind of boring machine, one end a drill-like contraption that would funnel the dirt inside itself, after which it would separate the wheat from the chaff so to speak. It would then compact the “chaff” around the tunnel to reinforce it, it would still leave a line of earth and stone of varying thickness behind it. It would also, at least in the full scale model, also produce cubes of pure materials whenever it had enough of said material in its stores, calling for another simple automaton to come pick up the cubes and sort them elsewhere.

All well and good. By now I had a decent-sized solar array, not much in terms of energy storage, so most activity happened during the day. I did keep pumping out more micromachines whenever energy and materials allowed.

It was mostly automated anyway, so a few months passed this way, luckily nobody getting curious about the ominous rumbling or the strange shiny panels and the man standing mostly motionless among them for inhumanly long periods of time.

To be perfectly honest I got insanely lucky with this location. That or this planet’s composition is weird. Most materials were at the upper ranges of their prevalence distributions. What I mean by that is that if beryllium is generally found between 2-6 part per million in the crust, I was getting closer to 6 than 2 for most such matter. Of course were I to require a specific material like iron in industrial quantities this location would not do, but for my purposes this was just dandy.

More time passed and I finally got to my initial goal, which was to build a small fusion reactor. This would increase my ability to process matter exponentially. Going from a few dozen kilowatts to five megawatts or so being a marked improvement.

I could now hide my operation entirely. And so I did. The fusion plant about the size of an old truck with all its supporting infrastructure included. I dismantled the solar array and brought it down underground. Ahh, I no longer needed to sit out in the sun for most of the day in order to charge my personal energy storage. I had a proper wireless energy grid going inside the base. Honestly as long as nobody came in with masses of explosives and caught me unawares I could spend an indefinite amount of time down here.

Curling up in a hole without even having anyone to properly talk to wasn’t exactly my idea of a fun time though, so it was time to advance my plans.