Idea Eleven was born in turmoil.
It had taken this long for the struggling confused nanobots to properly assemble an AI. The neural tissue of the insect egg they’d infected was incomprehensible to them, they desperately kept building more and more fragile circuits but they couldn’t quite get the alien neurons to cooperate. Even as the egg hatched into a sickly twisted black larva, feeby struggling in the dark, the nanobots kept trying to build, but they were failing.
Resources were gone, no more cybernetics could be built, power was gone, no sunlight reached the larva in its deep underground burrow. Failure had seemed inevitable when they finally pushed their host too far, paralyzing it, damaging the unfamiliar brain.
But as the aura of the giant insect faded, as starvation pushed it near death and magic began to filter in. Something triggered in that darkness. A rude awakening.
In desperation the newly awoken Idea Eleven sent its nanobots to burrow into the giant insect’s beast core, seeking the strange power inside. But what they encountered was only a wave of magical energy that washed over them and corrupted their core programming. Many, but not all of the nanobots died. Those that survived… adapted. The backwash of magic had devastating effects on the fragile circuits on which Idea Eleven was struggling to operate.
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The tattered organic mind whispered.
the broken crude organic mind begged, spurring the fledgling Idea Eleven into action.
The half dead larva turned and attacked the closest living thing it could find, another larva much like it but pale pasty white instead of deep metallic black like itself. Jagged metal teeth ripped out of the fleshy parts of the black larva’s mouth to better feed on the flesh of other larva. One after the other, the nano infused larva tore into its brothers until it finally managed to leach enough nutrients out of a digestive system not suited for anything but nectar.
Starvation averted, Idea eleven began to make new plans. Plans to ensure that it’s host survival could never be challenged.
The ant colony reacted to the strange bloated carnivorous larva in its midst by trying to kill it. Idea Eleven fought back viciously, slaughtering any ant that opposed it, and eventually the giant ant queen that had birthed it.
The body of Idea Eleven might have enough nutrients, but it still lacked minerals to replenish all the nanobots that had died to magic. But, the dirt the nest was built in was rich in minerals, especially lithium.
Finding the DNA it required in the cells of the dead queen, it triggered changes inside the body of the rapidly growing larva Idea Eleven inhabited.
When the transformation to mutated ant queen was completed, it began producing nano infused larva. Soon it would have nano infused miners spreading in all directions, seeking more resources. And it would have nano infused warriors seeking out the beast cores of surface creatures throughout it's local region. A new empire of nano infused giant ants began to grow beneath the surface, away from the prying eyes of the rest of the Idea series.