Chapter 1: Reconstitution
dGhl-IHBy-b3Rh-Z29u-aXN0 saw nothing but light and felt nothing but fire. And from that fire he emerged into a void. He could feel himself disintegrating; his organic thoughts becoming fleeting and disjointed. His electronic mind filled with error messages about data corruption.
He realized his mind was failing and automatic fallbacks, originally meant for traumatic brain injuries and neurotoxins, fired to stop the decay. His brain flooded with neurotransmitters, every neuron becoming a flurry of activity as they tried to replace failing pathways. Memories ran in loops, reinforcing and replicating themselves. Essential parts of his mind rebuilding themselves over and over to survive.
His implants and electronic mind had to endure the same. Data was corrupted, recovered from replicas, only to be corrupted again only moments later. His mind systematically swept all stored data in an endless cycle, fixing any discrepancies that it could recover from. Unrecoverable chunks were deleted and the freed space used for more backups. Whatever safe storage he could detect was overwritten with heavily packed data containing everything essential.
And suddenly the decay stopped. His internal clock timed it as having lasted only 13 seconds, but the recovery process took far longer. Missing parts of his mind were filled in from the base genetic blueprint. Internal data storage was a flurry of activity as everything was unpacked, reprocessed, reorganized and rechecked for errors. The damage itself was lower than expected. Essential data was stored with heavy redundancy and recoverable. The heaviest hit seemed to be surface level and unprocessed memories, but even those could be reconstituted. It took 5 hours, 43 minutes and 16.086 seconds for normal operations to even vaguely restart.
Something had happened while dGhl-IHBy-b3Rh-Z29u-aXN0 was incapable of paying attention. His three damaged eyes and arm were back, and not just those. He was perfect. Every sensor returning optimal conditions. There used to be a pinched nerve cluster caused by a fracture in his chest armor, and a chemical imbalance in the deltoid of his upper right arm. He felt ideal, as if this was how he was always supposed to be. As if he had been grown in sterile lab conditions with perfect equipment and impossible radiation shielding. His true form as described by his genetic code.
And it was an obvious lie. Internal sensors were working as expected, reacting to internal processes, but external ones were returning smooth, perfect signals. No heating from his own presence, perfect pressure inconsistent with his ease of movement. Either he was inside a machine that could compensate for arbitrary heat generation and movements. Or the more likely option was that his body was not real. It was impossible to tell if his mind physically existed or if it was merely an emulation in some supercomputer. He leaned more towards emulation, it would mesh better with his sensor data.
This had been thought of in one of the countless simulations they ran while asleep, although the assumption was that emulating the organic components would be impossible. Standard operating procedure was to attempt to hijack anything that interfaced with his mind. And if he was fully virtual, then he needed to immediately report to fleet command for debrief and execution. It was highly illegal for anyone not on the ruling Council to have their mind uploaded. It was also an open question whether as a created species he would qualify as sentient AI, which would also be illegal, and might result in the execution of the research team which created them depending on internal politics and whether someone needed a pretext to eliminate them.
It also meant that whatever had kidnapped him had superior tech to all known factions. The rebels did not and could not have access to this kind of technology. This was some new threat. They also had physical access to his mind, enough for this emulation, meaning they had access to all information he had. Including troop deployments, operating procedures, long-term plans and equipment schematics for everything he might ever need to repair.
His path was clear. He would need access to subspace communications and contact the fleet at any cost. There was an existential threat to the empire and they would need to immediately alter combat posture and requisition additional industrial capacity.
dGhl-IHBy-b3Rh-Z29u-aXN0 began systematically combing through every single sense, sensor and port for any interfaces. He did not need to look very hard.
The signal from his organic eyes was being overwritten somewhere along the optical nerve. All physical signals were consistent with his eyes seeing nothing but an empty void, but an image reached his visual cortex regardless.
It was an image of a cave composed of a large chamber and a single long tunnel leading to the distance. The only source of light in the chamber being a small blue crystal floating between a stalactite and stalagmite pair. Down the tunnel, there was a small bit of what seemed to be natural light emanating from an entrance. The walls were covered in cracks and shifting, as if they had recently been under great pressure and were still settling.
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His proprioception, his sense of location of his limbs, was not overridden, but rather had an extra high-capacity signal melded into it. His implants were utterly confused by the signal and would require readjustment, but apparently there were alterations to his organics to accommodate the new input. His senses of touch and temperature were similarly affected.
It was the cave. Every surface of the cave was thickly covered in sensors down to the millimeter, the grid even penetrating actual meters beyond the surface. Was this some kind of nanite swarm? The entire sensor cluster seemed to emanate from the crystal. Possibly either a control transmitter or the actual place he was stored, and thus his new real body.
He found he could freely alter the location of his visual perception and place it anywhere along the sensor swarm, although it was quite pointless inside the walls. The outgoing tunnel was included and he peered out of the entrance. The cave was in a forested area and surrounded by uprooted trees and piles of dirt, as if the entire cave and entrance had been violently excavated by something akin to an explosion. Further examination revealed a weakness in his senses. His sight rapidly degraded further from the cave. He attempted to estimate his position based on stars in the sky, but was unable to see nearly anything but blue. It was most likely not actual sight, but some kind of processed result from all the sensors working together.
He continued examining his senses. Most of them had signals either spliced with or entirely overwritten by the sensors from the cave. But his implants detected alterations beyond this. Something was trying to interface with him, but having a hard time of it. It was combing through his organic memories, triggering strange mixtures of inputs that did not quite add up to much. They felt like instructions and attempts to elicit something related to negative outcomes, dangerous situations, defensive postures and death. The instructions were the clearer signal. They were instructing him to dig deeper and move the central crystal to a more defensible location and to boobytrap the tunnel.
dGhl-IHBy-b3Rh-Z29u-aXN0 realized what it was trying to elicit from the attempt at defending the crystal. An emotion present in nearly all naturally evolved organic lifeforms: fear and a sense of self-preservation. But with him, the only thing it was accomplishing was randomly injecting memories of dangerous situations into his thoughts. Hopefully it would stop, but it was still an incoming signal from something, meaning it might be possible to hijack it and transmit the other way. It was becoming obvious that whatever he was attached to, was not meant to contain his species nor a cyborg judging by the way it was overwriting organic senses instead of tapping into his implants with a digital signal.
It was not the only new input. Something else had lodged itself into a nerve cluster used for communication between his implants and organics. It had been completely incomprehensible at first, but seemed to be rapidly switching between different encodings and refining itself. What it ended up with was something completely nonstandard, something that relied on error correction and undocumented aspects of his implant data processing and on bouncing signals repeatedly between his organics and implant to be decoded. dGhl-IHBy-b3Rh-Z29u-aXN0 was forced to turn off error messages from that connection point just to stop it from flooding his logs.
But this was a two-way connection. He could send queries. And so he asked his first question. STATUS
STATUS
NAME: Unnamed Dungeon%%%%%%£12346625% CORE LEVEL: 1;
MANA EXPENDITURE: 0
MANA STORAGE: 12.8331168 / 128.0
MANA GENERATION: 1.95776111111111111111111111111111;11111111111111111111111111111111111111
111111111111111MANA EXPENDITURE: 0 MANA EXPENDITURE: 0 MANA EXPENDITURE: 0
MANA GENERATION EFFICIENCY: 0.97888
MANA EXPENDITURE: 0 MANA EXPENDITURE: 0 MANA EXPENDITURE: 0 MANA EXPENDITURE: 0
MANA EXPENDITURE: 0
MANA EXPENDITURE: 0 MANA EXPENDITURE: 0 MANA EXPENDITURE: 0; MANA EXPENDITURE: 0; MANA EXPENDITURE: 0MANA EXPENDITURE: 0MANA EXPENDITURE: 0MANA EXPENDITURE: 0MANA EXPENDITURE: 0
MANA EXPENDITURE: 0MANA GENERATION: carries a greater burden in the garden of the gods of this earth. a leeching of the essential forces in the cycle of the creation of the new so that it may begin an ascension into the new. the flesh of the gods made manifest through will and compounded by their nature and the formation of a greater cycle as the remnants of the godhead lie in waiting beyond the veil with envy. new creation begetting weapons of flesh and bone and ligament. a tower of flesh begetting a willful god of vengeance blinded by its own past to the consequences of its actions. the end has come and it carries a mind of metal and alchemy. beware dying trees and false light. beware the birds of prey hiding in the sun. beware the weakness of truth left untoldMANA EXPENDITURE: 0MANA EXPENDITURE: 0MANA EXPENDITURE: 0
MANA EXPENDITURE: 0MANA EXPENDITURE: 0
MANA EXPENDITURE: 0MANA EXPENDITURE: 0
MANA EXPENDITURE: 0
MANA EXPENDITURE: 0
MANA EXPENDITURE: 0
MANA EXPENDITURE: 0
MANA EXPENDITURE: 0
MANA EXPENDITURE: 0
MANA EXPENDITURE: 0
MANA EXPENDITURE: 0
MANA EXPENDITURE: 0
This still required additional processing.
NAME: Unnamed Dungeon
?ID?: 12346625
CORE LEVEL: 1
MANA STORAGE: 12.8331168 / 128.0
MANA GENERATION: 1.9577611
?MANA GENERATION?: MISSING RESOURCE AT MEMORY LOCATION 1743678323
MANA EXPENDITURE: 0
MANA GENERATION EFFICIENCY: 0.97888