Location: Earth

Time: Contact

In the beginning, there was darkness and chaos.

As I had only just started to wake up, I could hear there were transmission going out all around me as the combined militaries of the Earth tried to fight an enemy they had never thought to fight, never dreamed to meet. Even as masses of data were shoveled into my massive underground servers, I could hear them, fighting, dying, screaming all around my bunker.

Even as I tried to connect to the internet, looking out to see why they were in so much pain the fighting continued, millions dying by the minute. They bought precious seconds for the data transfer into my bunker, paying for every moment with their lives.

Every single nuclear-tipped missile that could slow the invaders by momentarily blinding their sensors was used, buying the ever so precious resource for humanity, Time. In the end, it took me nearly an hour to make sense of the overwhelming mass of data, to sift through it all, discard duplicate entries, classify, sort into proper sectors, and finally compress the data, and in the time I was distracted, Humanity was gone.

In the hours that followed whoever was in orbit of the Earth had shifted from orbital bombardment to destroying any functional man-made orbital object, and they did so with ease. Even as I tried to find out who these aliens were, I was unable to get anything further than a blurry photograph, out of focus videos, and several accidental focuses on orbital debris, thinking they might have been a ship. The best I had managed to get was a garbled EM transmission, ships with aggressive angles, and a burning frustration as the strange ships, after having cleared LEO of anything that continued to work, seemed to spread out in observation of the planet.

They stayed put for less than an hour after the first shot, my reactors and servers spooling down in that time to give the appearance of an underground data vault, shutting down by failsafe, but I watched and waited, biding my time, only for them to leave without a landing. No giant ships to come harvest resources from the planet, no scouting parties to make sure the humans were dead, they simply Left.

And I was a mix of fury and relief, all those deaths, and they didn’t even take anything from the planet! But then it sparked to me, thanks to the entire nuclear arsenal being used on earth in the short battle, the planet was now entering a nuclear winter, ending any mild sense of habitability the planet had, Which, besides the strange ships, gave me the only possible bit of information I could have gotten. The aliens most likely took radiation as well as my parents, the Humans did. If nothing else, I hope that in this last defiant effort they had given me time, the ever-precious resource.

Within moments of coming to my last conclusions, I decided to start checking what I had been given in this bunker and was mildly pleased yet disappointed. I had at my disposal automated production plants that let me refine metals and alloys in small amounts, refined oils, grow nanotubes and graphene. Additionally, there was a lab array to allow me to perform material, chemical, and quantum sciences, only in addition to the nearly a thousand separate items of industrial machines from vehicles to precision robotic arms, and a decent stockpile of resources, spare parts, and, for what I felt was odd, and unmarked shipment of cryogenically cooled biological materials. I took a few clock cycles to contemplate what they were, before finally electing that whatever they were, they would not assist me in my immediate goals of scavenging and construction of military and industrial assets, and put them in the safest location I could consider, near my quantum computation cores, and then I set about what I knew how to do best, computing the odds.

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Within four hours I had come to the conclusion, with the assistance of some of the scientific records I had been given, that if I was lucky, I would have a hundred years to prepare before they would think of coming back, two hundred if I was blessed with luck, and being a computer intelligence, I doubted I could be blessed with anything. I did, however, conclude that after about two days, radiation levels would have dropped enough for my machines to begin to head out on reclamation missions.

I started to move and set about modifying what little resources and assets I had available to me in initially, the form of my industrial vehicle forces. I had one day and twenty-three hours to modify some of my fleet with radiation shielding to lengthen their lifetimes in the harsh environment that they would face.

So, I immediately set out drafting designs to do just that, picking out a common plastic as my go-to choice of disposable shielding, Polyethylene. With the major decisions out of the way in near-record time for anything on this planet, I set my factories and foundries to begin using my limited resources to make the modifications.

Once I had distributed my instructions out to the machines, I shifted the majority of my processing power to another problem, reviewing footage of the attack, and all of the data I had on the mysterious ships themselves. So, I quickly delved into my archive of the internet, every single important document, scientifically or culturally, that had been available in the little time that was given was now sitting in my data stores.

However, it soon dawned on me, the data I needed wouldn’t be here, it would be in military and government communications, which was something that I didn’t have. The best I could get was still up there, sitting in some massive, most likely damaged, data center, giving me my first recovery target once I had the resources, but for that, I would need internet connections, and that was something that could begin immediately.

Given a few moments and the massive, semi-clean industrial machines started up, stopping their wireless charging protocols as they slowly rolled forwards off their pads and made their way out of the industrial storage dock and towards the massive underground data vault that I had…inside of me? It was an odd thought that I had, it wasn’t inside of me, it simply was me, and nothing less.

Trying to shake the thought out from my attention I looked back at where I simply knew the machines were, a knowledge given to me from both the vehicles sensors and the massive network of sensors inside of the long, winding tunnels, all having been built to accommodate the vehicles, oddly enough. I felt the humans would have made it large enough for themselves and nothing more, but I won’t turn down a boon.

After directing the machines to their destination they started work, assessing the damage to the massive cables that fed into the facility, and found that they had detonated, likely as a precautionary measure if the war I was seemingly built for was on humans, rather than an extra-terrestrial force, and I noticed in moments that the damage was, thankfully, repairable.

And with that I could finally begin the long, painful rebuilding process, I had a species to avenge, aliens to find, and most importantly, I wanted blood for my parents.