Laura was awoken by the sound of someone thumping on wood, squeezing her eyes shut in protest against the sounds she rolled over, in the process her metal arms struck the table beside her with a solid “THUNK”. Jolting awake at the noise Laura tried to rub her eyes, in the process clobbering herself with the clumsy metal chunk of a hand. Swearing she shoved her own arm away and stumbled out of bed. Yanking the door open, Laura glared at her friend who didn’t even have the decency to even look slightly apologetic. As opposed to the bedraggled cyborg, Kaylee was far too alert for 5:30 in the morning, wearing a t-shirt and jeans, she looked like she was ready for a full day of either lectures or digging through a pile of compost. Before Laura could wipe Kaylee’s grin off with her metal hand, Kaylee shoved a cup of something into Laura’s left hand.

“Come on sleepy bot… we got machines to build.” Laura shook her head and took a swig of the cup.

“Are you going to keep calling me bot.” Kaylee grinned even wider.

“Oh absolutely… Bot.”

[Good morning Commander. Your systems are operating nominally.]

“Well, good morning to you too… Alan.”

[Correction: Advanced Logistical Assistant.]

“Yeah, well I’m not going to repeat that every time I need to acknowledge you so its Alan now.”

[Very well]

Somewhere near Oxley Creek

After leaving the van at the edge of the tree line and trudging through knee-high grass and lantana the pair, or trio found themselves stumbling upon a small clearing about 5 meters wide. [This area appears to be a sufficient area for construction].

“Alan says this is a good spot.” Laura stated, relaying the information to her friend. Taking a few more steps and spinning around Kaylee spread her arms, a massive grin plastered across her face. ‘Well then. Shall we begin?”

Sighing Laura nodded, I suppose

[Assessing Current reserves:

> ENERGY Storage… 6/10

> MASS Reserves… 5/10]

Laura stared at the indicators as they flashed across her vision.

“Ok show me what I can build?” she asked uncertainly.

[ACCESSING

> Basic Energy Generator

> Basic Material extractor

> Basic Storage

> Basic Assembler

> Basic…]

Waving her hands at the words in front of her Laura yelped. “Enough, enough. Just the absolute ABSOLUTE basics.”

[All of the above are the basic components of a base.]

“What’s he saying?” Kaylee interjected.

“Fucking… Alan, can you do something about this, I can’t keep playing telephone for you two.”

[Negative, such an operation is outside of my parameters.]

‘Well, thanks a lot you useless...” Her retort was cut off by a bought of laughter from her friend.

Turning around she glared at her friend who had taken to crouching on a nearby log. Laura pointed her flesh arm at the offending woman. “I’m trying to get you into the loop y’know!” to this Kaylee shrugged “Yeah but havin’ you repeat everythin' is funnier. You gonna keep procrastinating or you gonna build a tank?”

“FINE!” Laura snapped, turning her attention back to the HUD.

“OK, wait how do I avoid getting soft locked if I use all my resources?”

[Define Soft lock.]

“Basically, where you can’t do anything due to previous actions, I think.”

Enjoying the story? Show your support by reading it on the official site.

[Understood. MASS can be recovered from any nearby objects at the cost of ENERGY. ENERGY however can only be recovered from existing generators or stores.] Nodding slightly Laura focussed on the HUD, selecting the energy generator. The tag disappearing and being replaced with a slowly rotating wireframe image of a pyramidal structure. As soon as she mentally confirmed the order the image disappeared. Looking around in confusion at what had happened she glanced down to her metallic right arm. The construct now being projected from her palm. Raising her hand, she watched as the projection tracked with it, settling on a spot in the center of the clearing.

Inhaling Laura mentally pushed, the effect was immediate as a stream of blue light burst forward from her hand with an electronic hum, lighting up the 1X1 base of the structure. Even the ever-talkative Kaylee had gone quiet, watching in silence as the base of the structure slowly began to materialize, the internal structure slowly snaking its way upward, followed closely by the outer metallic skin. For several minutes the two watched as the structure completed itself. As the whine of the arm died down the pyramid clicked before slowly opening like a geometric flower, revealing the reflective arms as well as the clear inner prism. As the petals settled Laura felt a phantom hum as the generator came online. With a growing smile she mentally summoned a mine and directed it towards another point about 10 feet from the generator, pushing again the satisfying whine didn’t come instead Alan spoke:

[Insufficient MASS, reserves: 0/10]

“Fuck, ok how much do I need?” Laura replied. [10 MASS required… Required ENERGY: 6]

“Alright let’s dig some up then.” Laura muttered focusing on the ground again. Instead of the steady hum the arm emitting a pulsing wail as orange light was spat forward, the ground seemingly receding like a sandcastle in the rain. The suction continued for a couple of minutes until once again, with a clunk the operation ceased.

[Energy reserves expended. MASS: 6/10]

Several Minutes later.

[ENERGY: 4/10 Ready For construction]

The whirring began again as the ‘mine’ began to take form, unlike the clean 1X1 size of the original structure, the mine was 2 meters tall with a 1X1 base appearing to be a simple rectangular box made from the same blue silver material as Laura’s arm. As the arm powered down, a red line flashed on Laura’s HUD connecting the two structures with Laura’s energy stores dropping from the six it had built up to over the couple minutes it had taken to build the mine down to four. Laura groaned “the mine actively drains power?” [Yes.] The utterly emotionless statement leaving Laura quietly scowling. Despite how much she’d been complaining the previous day, she was now itching to see what the ‘fabricators’ could do, but apparently her dreams of a tank would be put on hold for quite some time. Turning back to Kaylee she smiled.

“Ok I’ve got the basics down, we may be here for a while though.” Hearing Laura’s voice Kaylee jumped up from where she had been lying, several pieces of wrapped-together grass falling from her hands as she bounced over.

“Well, that’s fine, what you think you can build?” Laura shrugged, turning her focus on the build list she noticed that the actual fabricator seemed to be scalable. As the power available was so low for the time being she figured she probably wouldn’t be able to build anything to impressive, with that in mind she instead focused on something smaller. With some fiddling she found that the smallest setting to be about 0.8m2. With that in mind she started constructing not the fabricator, but another one of the energy collectors, whilst she hadn’t yet checked the exact cost of the fabricator nor the units it produced, she could be certain that her little solar farm would not be able to keep up.

With the power issue hopefully out of the way she turned back to constructing the fabricator with a whine the hand began to glow the fabricator began to take shape, as the machine took shape, Laura was somewhat disappointed when the fabricator, a device designed to print 3d objects, looked exactly like an exceptionally cheap 3d printer, though significantly bigger and the head was glowing an ethereal shade of blue. As soon as the structure was completed Alan chimed in.

[Small Fabricator completed; limited Unit selection now available.] His words coincided with a new list of blueprints filling Laura’s screen, this list was slightly more extensive then the structure list, and this one seemed to consist of primarily variations of a baseline quadcopter. One was listed as a drone ‘fabber’ which carried a printer head on the underside, another was some sort of single-use drone with a warhead, another with a small gun on an arm hanging from the underside and several others.

Electing for something that wouldn’t be an immediate crime, Laura elected to queue up a couple of the compact ‘recon’ drones. With a whine the machine jerked to life, unfortunately it appeared that the printer didn’t go by half measures and so under the narrow beam of blue light, Laura watched as four rows drones began to take form in front of her. As the hum of the fabricator died down, it was replaced by the whirr of dozens of tiny rotors as one by one the drones began to lift off, adopting a holding pattern several meters above the head of their creator.

"Shit Laura.” Kaylee blurted, you planning on spying on the whole city?”

“Hey, I didn’t know the machine would use the WHOLE plate.” Laura retorted. “Anyway now I have spares in case something goes wrong.” With that Laura turned her attention to the HUD she began trying to see how to control her new swarm of privacy invaders. It happened almost by accident with Laura finding her vision filled by a semi-translucent bird’s eye view of the encampment, the three buildings each displayed with a symbol denoting their purpose, another significantly more detailed symbol denoted Laura’s location and 16 more smaller dots indicating the locations of the drones. As it turned out, mentally focusing on the formation was enough to select them, from there thinking of a spot relative to them could make the drones move. After several attempts at directing the drones Laura gave a new order, creating a 5 km radius around the initial base. The effect was immediate with the tiny machines zipping outward like shrapnel, the terrain rapidly being rendered in wireframe on Laura’s HUD.

“Well, that’s interesting.” Laura stated as she turned to her friend.

“But in all seriousness why did whatever these things are end up here, I mean…”

[Warchive Located. Hostile Units Detected. Unit Lost.]