For the past few days after reaching the annoying room, Alissa had waited to get at least a basic defense set up. Now that that was complete, she sent her forces down the non-vertical entrances to this room. Squads made primarily of skirmishers with several drones for fighting and two guards for commanders, began to march off to the left and a few went up the stairs she had created into the tunnels that came in from the roof of this new room. For now, she called this place checkpoint one, it was simply a final checkpoint before entering her main cavern. Following these squads were groups of eight to ten workers carrying base stations and relays that they then placed periodically throughout the tunnels.
Alissa had little active interest in these as she simply set up basic commands to harvest resources for construction and to smooth out the walls and floors after they expanded her mana network in that area. Each station had the starting number of bots that they would expand as needed. Like the main room she wanted a snowball effect to take place as the ‘oldest’ stations eventually completed their function before sending the unneeded parts of their swarm to the newer stations to increase the productivity.
As the core seemed to be able to handle the amount of corruption flowing in, she saw no reason not to expand its influence as far as her minions could patrol. The only downside was that creatures that lived in her domain seemed to get stronger over time. She did not want to power up hostile forces by allowing them to sit idle in her domain.
These patrols were doing their thing occasionally killing off solitary creatures and sometimes collecting others based on her commands through the interface. Nova played a huge role in this as she was the one largely planning out the basic structures through ‘World Builder’ and monitoring the patrols. Alissa simply didn’t possess the processing power to control and command this many at once, this had more to do with the sheer number of commands each group needed due to being very poor automatons, as the sophistication increased so to would her ability to command separate groups simultaneously.
Meanwhile she was working on expanding her production capacity. The territory she controlled was small, but it had a stupid amount of ground to cover. Overall, her domain hadn’t exceeded the size of a small village, that was complicated by the winding and disconnected nature of the tunnels. She was working towards connecting them up via passageways but even if she did, she still needed more minions. Not just more but better.
Alissa in gaming terms had a tall, and quality over quantity playstyle as her preferred. This did translate into how she acted in the real world, overall, she had nothing against swarming enemies with numbers, but she would rather not be wasteful of resources and lose more than necessary, just to save her time in producing better creations.
That was why she was here in the workshop; she was drawing up plans for something that resembled mass production. So far aside from the ‘skin’ on her guards all of her creations used pretty interchangeable parts. Some parts, however, took longer to build than others. Therefore, what she needed to do until she had the chance to really build a factory or true assembly line, was redistribute her production assets. Parts like motors, the skin weave, the skirmisher’s heads and claws, these parts took longer than others. So, she set portions of the floor and walls to building each part of her minions. There were more spaces for the complicated parts to make up for the longer build time and fewer for the simple components, after completion several workers would sort them into bins. When building the new minions' other workers would assemble them and add the activation seed.
This streamlined process would also allow for the expansion of her forces with newer interchangeable models. That brought her to the next task, she needed a smaller, and more agile fighter. Something that could explore the small and narrow areas that crop up in a cave system and wasn’t bothered by exploring or fighting on vertical surfaces. She again had two models in mind, well four… if one was being technical. The first was a scout, smaller and more designed for hiding and exploring. The second was a hunter-killer model designed to be a slightly larger and more lethal version that would hunt down prey in those areas too small for normal combat units. The four came from the need to cover both terrestrial and aquatic portions of the caverns.
For the land-based models she was going to go with something that looked like a centipede as the scout, long narrow and flexible. It would be able to traverse most if not all of the openings in the tunnels, to make it more versatile she also gave it a set of jaws on both ends to move forwards or backwards. These jaws would be capable of grinding through the blockages and widening the crevice it was going through and spitting out ground up material behind it. Nano-swarms could be sent in to clean this out, if necessary, beyond that in the center of it upper jaw she placed a “venom” sack filled with one use attack nanites.
Not having access to actual venom or the processes/ materials to make it she went with disposable bots that would be injected into the victim and just start wreaking havoc on any biological material they came in contact with.
She put the same mechanism in the hunter-killer version as well, this model taking the form of a spider with bladed forelimbs was about the size of one of the goblins torsos with its legs fully extended and unlike the centipede had the capacity to slowly refill its “venom” from its abdomen. The centipede needed to restock from a base station after using the four doses its sack contained.
The aquatic versions were largely the same the scout was an amalgam of the centipede and a sea snake. It had a few limbs to anchor itself and to crawl forward, as well as fins for locomotion, and gas bladders in the segments for floatation. The hunter-killer was a lobster like creature capable of forward motion and had two pincers with sharp spikes on the inside to pin prey and a mouth with the same “venom” as her other new creatures. These would mostly be hunting along the bottom of the waterways. She had no illusions about needing larger creatures to control large bodies of water, these would work for small waterways and the bottoms of larger areas.
~ * ~
As weeks passed while Alissa’s domain expanded and filled with her creations, she managed to finish up her house in the back bulge in the cavern. In her opinion the three story 20 x 30-meter house while modest for her lifestyle suited her quite well for the moment.
The house was largely filled with an open concept divided by waist high walls with little furniture. She finally got her bed and while it was pretty crappy it was definitely better than sleeping on the hard ground, a simple frame and a mattress and pillow made from the same fibers that she used for her guards' skin and filled with a very fine powder. This was the same concept she used for all her current furniture.
She also had some time to experiment with mana and how it worked with the gates she had seen in the core. Moving the mana through certain gates separated it from the ‘solution’ that comprised the energy that flowed throughout her domain. With this she could push them through some other formations to manifest that mana as its ‘true’ form, fire mana manifesting as an open flame or heating up the material around it. This led to her being able to make a primitive stove, which made for some very unhappy crustations in her ponds near the river. She was now using this mana to cook them up in boiling water and following it up with nutrient bars and shakes.
The only other thing that had been going on was the extremely slow progress in her expansion, with a constant stream of mana flowing into the core it kept pushing out her domain. She worked to keep that flow as a constant meaning she tried to maintain a ten percent of her total mana income being put towards the growth of that domain. This seemed to be the sweet spot to maintain growth while still being able to dilute the corruption flowing through the domain. It didn’t allow for much of an excess for her to work with, but she was largely fine with that as she still needed to find a practical use for this mana other than keeping her reserves topped off.
As the first versions of her new units flowed into the tunnel networks killing off the creatures around her domain, she began to notice a few things. Things like her gaining mana per kill reinforcing her network for power, and that some of the creatures became a part of her domain. That had been a remarkably interesting find some of the lifeforms in the caves actively became a contributor to the organism that was the core and its domain. They now contributed to the growth of this lifeform she was attached to.
Those creatures donated mana to the system and became more able to sustain themselves off the ambient mana that was produced, so the more the needs of these creatures were met the more they gave back to the system. So, it appeared that creating a viable ecosystem was absolutely necessary to keep the domains needs met. At the moment neither Alissa nor Nova had any real idea why some of the creatures became a part of Krystal while others seemed to become hostile.
While this was going on her minions and their patrols had been focusing their efforts on the larger artery to the left of checkpoint one. It was also around this time that she began losing some of her units to creatures that looked like a lizard with stone like skin had crushed several of her drones and skirmisher units in ambushes. They used their hides to blend into the environment and waited for prey or threats to approach before launching and attack usually with their obscenely powerful tails or crushing whatever they attacked in their jaws while pining them with long claws and body weight.
Other units were lost to gastropods (snails and slugs) that had dissolved the units they attacked, a few types had even left slime that trapped her minions until the creature returned and finished them off. At least one type of these menaces had spat an acidic solution that dissolved the stone her troops were made of from a distance. Several insect-like creatures had burrowed into the walls, floor, ceiling and other features of the landscape and also cost her troops. In that case though she noticed that they simply tried to destroy a threat rather than looking for food, these types would rather hide than fight.
However, considering the threat these things might pose if she left them be in the domain that was constantly improving the capabilities of those that lived inside it, well it probably improved visitors too, Alissa wasn’t willing to just leave it be. Annnnd, her minions also got stronger the more they fought, both because they learned through the system, and a disproportional amount of foundational improvement was seen in the most experienced patrols. There was a marked difference between the patrols based on how often they fought other creatures.
That had actually shocked the hell out of both Alissa and Nova when they first saw it as they were expecting the same units to always have the same capabilities. Some of the oldest and most experienced units actually began to approach and even surpass the core room guardians, despite the guardians spending all of their time training and being improved on in the cradles Alissa had put it to slowly improve the materials they were made of. That had prompted her to expand the max numbers of said guardians to 30 (five for her and five for the core) creating three shifts that she rotated between guarding, resting/improving, and joining the patrols.
At first, she had been worried that putting in the effort to improve her guardians was pointless, she had even lost a few to attrition in the tunnels, however as they improved, she was able to put that fear to rest. It would have annoyed her to no end to see all the resources and effort go to waste, but as they fought with the local fauna, she began to notice some trends.
First off, the guardians (Simple, Mk1 guard units with upgrades being applied) gained more, faster than their less sophisticated brothers. An analytics program running in the background of her implant, and one of Nova’s subroutines had identified some of the ‘how’ involving the improvement the domain put on Alissa’s creations. It had been analyzing every single one of her creations and their performance as a part of the operating system they used, the units gained a disproportional amount of ‘power’ based on both experience and the materials they were made out of. A unit made only of stone gained less than one that was more complex as an ‘organism’. Workers grew slower than drones and drones grew slower than guards, guards and the smaller automatons grew at the same rate. And skirmishers were slightly lower than guards. The trend was that the potential of a creature seemed to determine the rate of growth, it was honestly fascinating.
Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.
~ * ~
Yes, the possibilities where truly fascinating and infuriating as it seems that the more, she, and Nova, learned the more they had to change up their thought processes and reevaluate what they thought they “knew”. The analysis running in the background of her implant was always updating what was known, a brute force study of the things that they could see trying to make sense of this senseless place. And that was what was currently driving Alissa up the wall.
“Shit, how could we miss this?” she whispered to herself.
Nova decided that answering was not what her ward needed right now the question being rhetorical. The problem was a paradigm shift in thinking, they had both concluded that they were controlling their minions through normal means and that was simply not true according to the report they were seeing.
Because well to put it simply some of what was happening was impossible but not too impossible as to jump right in their faces as broken. None of the creations should work, like at all. The designs were sound and functional but the communications they thought they had didn’t exist. The analysis highlighted for example that the worker’s design was technically possible but only because it had seen some of the data from this place and filled in the blanks. Running the same design through World designer with the settings put to anywhere but this place and they failed. Passive data collection had auto updated and, like the boss it was, the program ran with it as it didn’t generate runtime errors.
That was a problem, the reasoning was sound but relied on the users input to account for the differences, the software also made no assumptions about the user's knowledge. You didn’t have to be an architect to use it to build an up to code building, but you did if you wanted to spot the inconsistencies in the data, those places where something shouldn’t work but they did. Yes that was the issue they were dealing with right now. Both of them thought that the nanites in the automatons allowed them to communicate conventionally and that was just wrong. They perceived that they operated normally including the command system but there was a hidden cutout, namely Krystal.
They saw through the core not Alissa’s implants and the transition was so seamless they didn’t notice. The background analysis called everything they knew into question about the linkage, making relays somewhat redundant as that wasn’t the system and wavelength they operated on. It was more subtle and lying underneath the conventional methods and the core somehow made it translate, or it might be more accurate to say they translated the core information the wrong way.
In any case it explained so much of what was going on for them. First the things they created were more like golems from a fantasy novel than like the robots Alissa was used to. Everything they did including the seed that made them close enough to “life” that the core could animate it, tie it into its defenses and communicate. However it was not enough to link to the complicated electronics of the implant, pure proximity explained the rest. Alissa’s commands went through the hidden network rather than the implant and the result was the same but with darker and honestly helpful implications.
The problem came with figuring this out as it caused a massive headache both figuratively and literally to Alissa, who was now climbing into bed and curling up in a ball from the pain that seemed to slide right past the blocks that normally prevented such events. Once known it seemed that reintegrating the systems was impossible and it would simply have to be acknowledged as her brain slowly delt with the dissonance and her implant reset itself to adjust to the problem.
For Alissa this required her to go into her subjective state and sort this out manually in her implant if she wanted it done in anything resembling a decent time frame. Nova could handle what was going on in the meantime this shit had to be sorted out now.
“Damned thing is always causing some sort of problem.” Alissa said under her breath as she dove into the programing.
~ * ~
“Well… this sucks.” Nova said in the virtual room she occupied, that room being the best way she had found to explain her existence to others who didn’t have an AI in their head. What she was seeing on the screens before her was… well bad was appropriate but failed to convey the true gravity. When Alissa went under performance in the domain dropped noticeably and while she could still control what was going on they were encountering far more monsters than normal in the tunnels. Attrition was up beyond sustainability. The automatons were dying faster than they could be replaced the moment they moved beyond the domain borders and a few encounters showed a deliberate attempt to corral the creatures patrolling out there.
“Damn. Damn. Double damn. Alissa’s not going to be happy when she gets up.” Unfortunately, Nova couldn’t interrupt over this as it wasn’t an exception and what Alissa was doing was one of those things that shouldn’t be interrupted once started.
The only thing the AI could do at this point was make a judgement call, and that was to recall the outside patrols and fortify to the best of her ability for a start trying to conserve their available forces. Secondly, she began to run prediction algorithms for the current status with the available known variables.
Beyond this, there was nothing the AI could do except try to preplan further defenses as she had limited autonomy here as her ward wasn’t in immediate danger. She did however queue up several base stations for both the micro-bot and nano swarms to have them ready to deploy. Then she moved on to the mini-bot design for Alissa to approve when she woke up as the next step to scaling their building and harvesting efforts. Though the design appeared to be prohibitively costly it would set the stage for the next step forwards.
“I really hope that she is in a better mood when she wakes up. I don’t like where this is going… stupid algorithms and their bad ideas.” Huffed Nova before laying back in her virtual room to observe what was going on.
~ * ~
It took Alissa an ungodly amount of time to fix the communication bug in her implant and separate out the background “magical” noise that caused the headache. That also included creating and running another background process for said background noise to yet again try to understand the processes that this world operates on.
However, that was becoming the expected result for everything right now a series of breaking down and analyzing every new bit of data to try and extrapolate a whole picture.
Nova’s report on what was going on was another matter entirely. That they would essentially be put under siege was not unexpected based on how the domain interacted with the toxic energy, and how violent the indigenous flora and fauna where. That it would happen so soon and when they were not prepared was unfortunate, still not unexpected with the uncertainty of the local landscape. Tunnel fighting, and limited resources precluded a lot of the normal siege tactics that she would use such as active patrolling and trying to use any fortifications as active weapon systems. So, she seemed to be limited to purely defensive measures from now on, unless a force multiplier was created.
“Hey Nova,” Alissa said drawing out the AI’s name “why exactly am I looking at these two glaring war crimes on my interface?” the prompts in question getting a heated glare and remaining unchanged.
Situation untenable. Attrition exceeds production of combat forces. Requires immediate action.
* Military forces insufficient create more… unable to increase production of current standard forces… Alternative: creation of secondary force possible… SOLUTION: begin creation of force known as Goblins (Species Number 000001) to meet numerical needs…
* Command and control insufficient… CnC infrastructure is insufficient… normal methods in-adequate... unable to produce command network for current forces due to incompatibility and single authorized entity designated Alissa for command… SOLUTION: Add Voidborne genetic material to entity known as Krystal… Use genetic material to create Command and Control creatures… probability of successful integration is 95.87%... Probability of enhancement package being present is… 87.98%... If successful new creature ability to interface to CnC network solves single point of failure currently in the Command… if unsuccessful new creature still capable of operations using network defined as “magical” … intelligence predictions for new creation vastly exceed that of any known and creatable species… Possibility of successful creation of an organized and socially compatible species 98.97%.
The reply was both unexpected and somewhat reassuring. “The options are not war crimes, technically speaking, only one is close. The first is simply heavily frowned upon not an actual crime in this scenario. It is not illegal to create an intelligent bioweapon such as the goblins to use them to bolster numbers. Your people have a heavy dislike of such things due to nature being a… well a bitch and making the creator lose control, therefore it should be done cautiously but for you in this situation it is not illegal or even an unexpected result.”
Nova continued sounding slightly nervous “The second prompt was entirely unexpected and is only sitting in the grey areas of genetic experimentation. You are not creating Voidborne, nor are you experimenting on them therefore it falls outside of normal regulations of such things. There’s also the issue of what is going on, which I dare say would have any lawyer convulsing at the shear absurdity, and current necessity. And even if this was somehow totally and unambiguously illegal, we simply do not have other options forget “good options” right now.”
“Nova we both know that there are good reasons for the restrictions on the creation of life outside of normal means and outside of known and tested applications. We also know that using Krystal as a workaround is not going to fly. Especially when we consider that we will be using both products as essentially bioweapons without a reasonable means of controlling the result.” Alissa whispered with a sigh hugging herself as tears started to fill her eyes.
She knew what it would happen, no matter how much she tried those born from her genetic material would be her children, not bots, not goblins to be used and thrown away.
They would be new.
Her people, intelligent and actual children that she had to send to battle, her children to care for watch over and watch die.
Created not out of love but necessity.
That was probably the most damning part here.
“Yes, we both know these things but what other option do we have? You are stuck here and will die if the defenses fail, and they will fail, we simply cannot produce a meaningful force with our current rate of attrition and the possibility of escalation. There are no other options for us with what we have, there are no defenses we can build that can reliably hold off the numbers we might face, not with what we know about the goblins rate of reproduction. Not when we have to scale up and use the wellspring for other purposes. Not when you are unable to view and maintain both control and expansion because you need to be here. Most definitely not when you are the only one who can reliably protect the core.”
“Ally you would need to be at the front the whole time to maintain it, our units cannot perform well enough without direct control to accomplish anything important, we both know that. We knew it before the bug in comms was found.”
Silence filled the space between the two speakers both mentally and physically it was a bad idea one born of shear desperation. Creation of sentient life even at the level of goblins was… complicated to say the least. The second option was borderline heresy for her people, the sort of thing that had more than once led to disaster and genocide throughout the history of the Voidborne’s long dominance of their galaxy. It wasn’t even a legal matter really, or philosophical, or moral.
Bioweapons had an overwhelming tendency to be uncontrollable, mother nature didn’t like being fucked with as far as such things were concerned. That unexplainable force always took control of the creations with wildly unpredictable results, the creations being woven into the natural even when the creator used the unnatural. It didn’t matter if it was a virus, a bug or an unstoppable organic killing machine. Once created, forget unleashed the danger was present. A single accident or unforeseen event and that creation would be free… and the consequences well they would be whatever they were… only time could tell.
For species that took the long view, like the Voidbourne, it was better to create something inorganic than biological, some of the risks still existed but usually that natural force stayed out of it. So far everything Alissa had made using the core’s power was already present that would include the goblins, but the use of them as a weapon still brought an almost instinctual dislike. The second point well unleashing something like even a primitive version of her people on this planet had…
Alissa shook her head to dispel the unhelpful thoughts. Nova and the algorithm spoke the truth and she knew it. No amount of emotional turmoil or instinctual fear was going to allow her to be killed off. If she had to eradicate all life on this miserable shit hole of a planet to be safe and possibly return home, she would do it.
“Fuck this planet.” Whispered a voice filled with desperate conviction.