Finally there was a chance to get to work on what faced her in her new prison… eh… home was probably the best way to look at the current situation. There were several problems that needed to be addressed.
First, Alissa needed a way to deal with the toxic energy that was overloading the crystal, she was going to call it a core as it seemed to be at the core of the field she was stuck in. She had named it Krystal, for her sanity as it was linked to her and was a unique feature of the room, she didn’t think it was particularly clever but hey she wasn’t exactly at her best (it also made her more able to throw some well deserved annoyance at the damn thing that had made her life so miserable recently).
This energy was coming from within the field, that was to say it was being gathered by said field. There was simply too much for the core to handle in the time it had.
That was part of the solution, she would corral the toxic energy into a crude circuit she was going to carve out in the room. The airborne energy was the key, while she didn’t know ‘how’ the core did what it did, she knew more or less ‘what’ it did.
She also knew that the material the core was made of was what did the processing not the circuits inside, those circuits simply directed and diverted the energy that had been taken in. Some of the entrances for energy on the core only pulled from the air while others tapped into, and channeled the energy from the floor, ceiling and walls. Those airborne channels were clear and fine so the energy in the air was at a level the core could handle.
Since she couldn’t directly manipulate the energy at this time, it would likely take months at best and more probably years to learn how to direct, she went with a brute force approach. She didn’t have the time to learn how to manipulate this energy over time like she had in school from controlled sources. Especially since her source wasn’t the definition of controlled.
By containing the energy in the circuit and forcing it to move hundreds if not thousands of times the distance to get to the core she would buy some time. This energy moved like sludge, if you could throw it at a wall it’s the type of thing that would ever so slowly slink down the wall. On the other hand the energy in the air was more ‘energetic’, moving faster and definitely less concentrated. By corralling it she hoped to speed it up using the pressure of what came behind to push it into moving faster. By spreading it out into smaller and smaller channels and by maximizing the space and exposed surface area she could reduce how fast it reached the core, and more importantly control the quantity that hit each intake.
This was going to have to be a multi-stage process, the second part of her plan was to redirect the excess into other intakes on the core, so some of what was coming from the walls would by added to the air. This would hopefully happen partially by leaving the circuits uninsulated, the faster it moved the more energy it had so some should flow from these channels into the underused air intake like water evaporating as energy was added.
Step three take control of the output. Controlling this was of vital importance as if the field expanded without having cleaned the areas already under control the problem would get worse. Small increases in diameter would mean proportionally larger increases in volume and neither the core or her were able to handle what they already had. The growth circuit for the field was based off of a clean energy intake, it took the energy and made it into the core’s personal energy drawing from directly around the core.
Step four was to take that clean energy and contain it in a secondary circuit she was going to build alongside the toxic one. With this she could directly dilute the sludge into a more manageable fuel source for the core. By damming up the energy and creating control gates at certain points she could control the ratios of energy and the flow around the room. It would also allow her to set up the energy to matter converter as a part of it to use the excess energy to create some of the materials she would have problems getting.
She would even go so far as to create loops in this circuit so that if she set the proper gates, the energy that was unacceptable would stay in the circuit rather than dump it into the core. In the process she would prevent growth and allow the core to clean the energy in the field, hopefully this would leave only the new flows of toxic energy moving into the now less dense region she was making. So over time the problem should resolve itself and she could hopefully let the field expand again.
Alissa thought of the process as pre-refining, and if she set it up correctly with little management she could handle new influxes of this toxic energy. It was a problem of the wrong fuel source, trying to use crude oil to power a jet engine, this would hopefully turn the sludge into a more manageable fuel source that didn’t risk stalling the engine.
She already had enough information from studying the energy gates in the core to do this by copying them into the room itself. Really it was a matter of scale if she covered most of the surfaces this way after this initial period of manual control she would be able to add more to newer areas. Hopefully creating a system that acted like it was automated.
It was in Alissa’s humble opinion a great plan. It was also going to be a gigantic pain in the ass to pull off.
~ * ~
Like most species anywhere near the Voidborne’s level of technology there was a truly enormous number of tools at their disposal, and a similar number of manufacturers. The variety on nano-swarms alone was mind boggling. However to simplify they classified their tech into four types, those being, simple, intermediate, advanced and complex. They might vary in their effectiveness from barely adequate to exceptional but this was their way of defining how they operated.
Simple devices were single purpose, they did one job and only one job. This didn’t mean they were useless they just lacked flexibility, so repair nano-swarms only repaired things. They couldn’t harvest materials from the environment, or build new things with those materials. They just repaired. There were a few cases where they could multi-task if those jobs where similar enough but were not strictly speaking multifunctional. Simple devices were hyper focused on doing one job. A civilian construction bot would have these to take care of its maintenance, a filter might have nano-swarms for cleaning, that was the sort of thing simple devices were used for, when you had a single action that needed to be performed they were cheaper and got the job done. Alissa’s multi-tools were simple devices they took on preset shapes based on user input but nothing more, they could not take a shape that wasn’t programmed in.
Intermediate devices had limited flexibility in what they could do. So a military construction bot might have a nano-swarm that maintained/repaired it, and acted as a defense system. In this case the swarm performs multiple different functions. Still limited but more versatile in how they carry it out. This was the single broadest category, as any device that could perform multiple different functions fell under it. If her multi-tools had an independent power source they would be intermediate devices, or if one of them had settings for both functions, or the user could create/add shapes as needed they would be intermediate devices.
Advanced devices were essentially a jack-of-all-trades, where they could perform adequately in most if not all the ways that type of tool was used for. Highly flexible and capable of bridging different job fields. Alissa’s nano-swarm was one of these, they could harvest, build, maintain, repair, disassemble, attack, defend or clean. In every way these were some of the best available if you needed flexibility in the field. So if her multi-tools could take any form she thought of with the material available, turning a blob of living metal into ‘smart’ matter able to become a drill by forming the components or to manipulate energy to get the same results with a screw, while being able to take the form of weapons of all types.
Complex was where things got interesting as they took everything an advanced tool could do and dialed one area into insanity. So a complex defensive multi-tool could do everything the advanced version could do but took defensive measure to a whole different level. Some of these could shape themselves into living metal guardians for their owner if need be. These devices were for those who needed flexibility but also needed something specific in one device. The complexity and niche nature of the devices made them rare.
For Alissa this was something of a problem as clearing the room with a nano-swarm was definitely possible but not efficient, it was honestly a conundrum. What she was doing was backwards and at the same time a catch-22. Typically you start with the largest and least precise instruments and moved to the more precise tools.
You don’t dig a foundation for a building with a one handed gardening shovel, you use heavy machinery. At the same time trying to use that large tool to actually create smaller more precise instruments didn’t work very well. So starting with the nano-swarm made the initial start harder but they could build bigger things relatively easily.
It would take days to make significant progress in clearing the room moving a few grains of sand, worth of material with each nanobot, while tools that mass moved materials were anything but portable they could do it in under an hour. While the swarm was making visible progress due to their numbers it wasn’t going to be fast enough. She needed a force multiplier to use against the workload she was facing.
Simply put she needed to reduce the nano-swarm’s efficiency temporarily to build a system of infrastructure, basically build more nano-swarms to take over. She didn’t have the high tech materials to replicate the current base station but she could create a crude and simple replacement to free up an overqualified swarm for more important matters than the most basic tasks. Even if she had to build several base stations for simple nano-swarms, the entire focus of that swarm would be on one task freeing up the more versatile versions for other tasks.
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So she set up the living metal wellspring in front of the core but away from the edge. This was probably the single most valuable object for her long term survival as there was no possible way to replace it. Its value was based on the ability to energize the matter in it
It created the seed. Inside each of the new base stations would be some of this matter, generated by feeding the wellspring and taking the awakened material out where it could grow. That ‘seed’ would then use the raw material brought to the station to create new nanobots for the swarm. Basically that was how the swarm was powered at the individual level of each nanobot. They became ‘living’ inorganic matter that would power themselves absorbing energy from the surroundings, what they needed even in numbers was less than measurable. A swarm of trillions of nanobots would barely make a measurable blip in the latent power of any room.
The wide shallow bowl at the top was attached to a thicker stand and a slightly wider base, about 25 centimeters in height. At the top were several narrow protrusions arching up and towards the center of the bowl, these fed energy into the center of the bowl actually transforming the material into living metal. As it completed the cycle the final product drifted down towards a drain at the bottom of the bowl. An unassuming droplet about the size of a small drop of water, that flowed like mercury at room temperature.
It would travel down to a platform just below the bowl, where it was stored in a cradle that kept it dormant and protected. When needed it would be collected by the bots that saw it as a required material to be installed and activated. As a small trail of nanobots fed a miniscule but steady stream of matter to the wellspring as it came to life.
It would create no more than three seeds a day if the material and power was available.
Like all the tools at Alissa’s fingertips it was limited by its size. They did their jobs fine but some processes couldn’t be rushed, and even with the tech level of her people there was only so much that could be done in such small packages. These tools where designed as stopgap measures they were to get to a point. They build up to the point were one could stop using them, they were never designed to be the final point.
Many people often forgot how insanely complicated a modern infrastructure was, it wasn’t as simple as it appeared on the surface. Some simple things available for everyday life required several separate businesses to create, everything from getting the resources to make tools to supplying the other factory, that uses those tools to build part A, to go with part B, which was needed to make resource C… it was a long complicated supply chain to make a home computer. Every resource used needs its own process, every component needed its own factory, the programs… the computer programs that needed computers to create… tools to build tools.
It was not easy to upgrade tech, and this completely disregarded the shear manpower requirements to get these things running. The tech she had leveled the playing field it was designed to create a much lower level than the tech base than the one that created it. Now if given enough time and access to the proper resources these tools could get to a similar level, kind of like a border planets tech versus the core worlds.
~ * ~
Another part of the swarm was building a base station for a crude nano-swarm, an arm length pill shaped container. Half its length in diameter with a multifaceted top. When completed it would be recessed so that only the top was exposed. When the ‘seed’ was put inside it would build nanobots in the multiple chambers inside using a combination of raw material and the living metal, the ratios of material to nanobot sucked as it took far more material than the mass of the nanobot would imply.
But it would work.
Even having to build several stations to cover the number of actions that the advanced nano-swarm performed. The specialized bots would allow her to use the more advanced ones for more complicated tasks instead of harvesting. Even with them being more effective, those advanced nanobots couldn’t out pace two or three dedicated stations.
So diverting to put a basic system in place was a must, getting the means to have a stable income of resources and an ability to maintain it indefinitely without tying up an overqualified swarm doing basic things.
Currently within what Alissa was beginning to think of as her domain the Advanced nano-swarm was dividing its focus leaving multi-colored trails across the cavern. Each nanobot emitting a small faint amount of light with representing the job they were preforming. Green lines showing those that harvested inorganic materials, red representing that they were harvesting organic materials, orange representing those that were constructing things, blue for those suppling materials to other sources.
For Alissa sitting on the ledge she could see the rough and uneven areas that were slowly ‘dissolving’. In some ways it looked like a fan was blowing sand in these areas driving them into orderly paths, stripping them down into a flatter even floor.
The immediate focus of the bots were on the ground closer to the base station working their way out, aside from those that were breaking down the bodies. Most of the material that was being collected flowed through the base station, the rest was directed to the wellspring or the converter that was powering the station. When the material entered the base station mostly rock, primarily limestone, it moved into different chambers within the station.
Some was for the station and a ‘small’ storage area for emergency materials. First though it was further processed into a true nano-material with the trace amounts of other materials separated and then smoothed into a form more easily manipulated by the bots.
After processing it was moved to a storage area designated in the room that was monitored by a small swarm of bots emitting a faint white glow, their job was keeping this material from being blown around and keep the different materials separate.
A final stream was smoothing the areas that need to be filled in. Starting by altering the present surroundings to accept the bonding that those nano-materials needed. Much later the nanobots would clear the rough rock around these places and replace it with these materials.
The clearance of what was already there had to run first. Leveling the floor, before directing the bots to cut the channels for the circuit. So far after several hours of this she had a pile of material about ankle height and almost three meters in diameter and had cleared the immediate area of about 30 meters around the core.
The bots had been using rough materials to form patch jobs shifting what was being disassembled into the construction of this new base station where possible, as making it from nano-materials would be preferable, but it wasn’t necessary. This mostly came from the swirling cloud that was digging the position for that first base station.
When completed it would take over the harvesting materials, most of the current swarm was clearing the floor, both for the materials and to create space for what was eventually going to be carved into the ground. Once the new swarm had built to sufficient numbers it would take over and the advanced bots would redirect to make more stations.
This was the type of process that couldn’t be rushed. Once she had this done she could scale it. It wasn’t going to be simple and she had to design modular circuits, she could expand on because waiting for the whole room to be cleared wasn’t feasible. She did need to start as soon as possible.
Alissa had already begun to use internal resources to support herself, eating away at her own power to meet her dietary needs. She recouped some from drinking massive amounts of water and remaining as stationary as possible. She was still feeling hungry, and flat refused to eat the things that had been killed, partly due to her disgust at them. Mostly it was because those organic materials wouldn’t last long for her, but could be used in different projects.
Nova had apparently assigned the creatures a common name, strangely based on some of the fictional creatures found in her peoples fantasy novels. While she didn’t get the whole reasoning behind the name, and a brief analysis forced her to agree.
That name was goblin.
~ * ~
Nova hadn’t been idle while the nano-swarm was breaking things down. She had been analyzing the properties of that data, most of which matched what was already present in her databases. The organic matter even fell within these parameters being made of the same types of matter, BUT it was arranged in a strange way, possessing and exhibiting unknown properties at a biological level.
The creatures had evolved, the pale almost translucent skin, was indicative of creatures that lived in a lightless environment. That glow to their eyes wad been some form of sight, it appeared based on the initial study to be the ability to ‘see’ heat. Reminiscent of some species her creators had encountered that did the same thing. While the other senses were slightly more developed they hadn’t grown reliant on say hearing versus sight. They existed in an environment without light and developed a way to see, however they appeared to be an adaptive species. Therefore these creatures became cave goblins, the strange part was that at a genetic level they were fundamentally the same creatures. This meant that their species had evolved in a way to allow further individual evolution.
This was probably a type of adaptation that based itself off of the success exhibited in their communal group. The more success they had in the group, the more their bodies would adapt to maintain or even surpass their current station. This made the community a highly competitive one and likely a violent one. It might even be the type of thing that allowed them to fill a species specific need for a specialized behavior.
Another thing was how packed with the same toxic energy they were. This may be a way to adapt to that, as the toxic energy wasn’t exactly healthy for them. Goblins had a short lifespan but the capacity for much longer lives. There were several possibilities and it wasn’t clear which was the truth at the moment.
One possibility was that this was a result of the toxic energy or a response to that same energy being present. This was kind of worrying in the long run as that same energy allowed them to perform at a higher level than purely biological reasons could explain. The survival of these larger goblins was an example of this, the primary analysis was showing that the energy was what stopped the attack from Aegis, it seemed the energy in this world was affecting things in multiple ways. They survived not because they were fundamentally tougher but because of the energy in their bodies diluting the attack. The goblins that had survived couldn’t do that based solely on the biological reasons, flesh didn’t resist focused high energy that well.
A similar energy was present everywhere in the cavern, the rock, the water, and the air. It wasn’t necessarily the same as the toxic energy floating around. No, it was more like the personal energy that Voidborne possessed. In a direct competition of strength a weaker energy cannot overcome a stronger one. There would be some attenuation of that energy but the stronger would always win, whether or not what was left could do anything really made no difference.
That was interesting.
There were possibilities there.