I woke up late and sore, my shoulders and thighs killing me over the long trek I’d made carrying all the tools. I’d gotten back well after dark and so it had taken even longer to get home, having to walk slowly to avoid falling, and stopping frequently to make sure I was going the right way.

I rolled out of my hammock and massaged my legs, slowly chewing bits of the fruit preserves. No sense leaving the rest of the jar and letting them spoil now, after they’d survived this whole time. With these, and the other couple cans I’d grabbed, I could have a day in peace to recover and work on getting these tools in shape and start banging them against the mass-fab.

Which is pretty much how I spent my day. Synthetic weave is, by design, not absorbent at all, so it wasn’t the ideal material for applying the deruster to the tools, but with the only alternative being the shirt off my back, I made do. Eventually, I had screwdrivers where I could actually change the bits, wrenches which could open and close without the assistance of another wrench, a flashlight that actually turned on, precision drivers which were more driver than rust, and so on.

So imagine my surprise when, in early evening, after finally getting the case off the mass-fab, I plugged in a new cell and it immediately came to life.

The mass-fab was a slightly misleadingly-named machine. It didn’t fabricate mass from nothing, but rather was able to take raw materials and break them down into their bits and pieces, and reassemble them into something with similar molecular makeup. Or something like that. It looked like a glass and metal-grille cabinet with an openable and empty top half and solid metal panels concealing the machinery in the bottom half, with a few controls on a panel in the middle.

In practice, operation was simple. Take things you didn’t want and put them in the open top-half portion and close it. Hit the dissimilate button and the machine breaks it down and stores the components in what could be likened to different cartridges of printer toner. Then browse through the machine’s stored blueprints and select one and it would print a new one from the stored materials. The dissimilation function was mostly a cost-saving and recycling feature, and when a specific cartridge ran out, they’d bring in a new one…but out here, with nobody bringing me replacement parts, I’d be completely dependent on it to refill any depleted stocks.

I also had the problem that if there was no blueprint stored, I couldn’t produce a thing. Blueprints were immensely complicated recipes which determined the composition and construction of an entire object, so they couldn’t just be made up by hand or anything. I had to hope there were some useful things in there to make, or else all my efforts here would be pointless.

So one can only imagine my frustration when I opened the blueprint menu only to have the screen spin on me for a few seconds before helpfully informing me “*Beep* Core corrupt. No data files could be loaded.”

I banged my fist into the machine and it replied with a cheery “*Beep*Tilt alert. Please do not rock or move the machine while in use.”

“In use? In use? You have no use! You’re a builder that can’t build anything. You are the most useless thing in this room, and this room is full of useless rusted shit!” I yelled at the mass-fab.

“*Beep* Volume alert. Please keep localized sources of noise to a minimum while machine is in use. Vibrations from loud noises can cause errors during assimilation.”

“Oh, I’ll give you a volume alert you useless piece of–” I stopped as I noticed a flashing light on the display and, after a moment where I balanced wanting to smash the shit out of the thing against the vain optimism that it could still somehow work, tapped the flashing indicator.

The screen changed to show the assimilation queue, the items pending a build. There was one item on the list, paused for some reason. I tapped the item and brought it up. The name and description were just garbage characters, looks like it hadn’t escaped the data corruption either, but it was still willing to try building it, and I had no other use for the dumb machine, so I punched the go button and waited.

Lasers flared into being in the upper cell, moving and combining molecular bits around and into place. My own crazy personal lightshow, flooding the entire bunker with lights through the holes in the grille, dancing off all the walls and shelves. After a few minutes, the novelty was gone though, and I left the machine to spew lights and softly whirr. It said it was 9% done even though I couldn’t even see anything in the cabinet yet.

I tried to amuse myself but found myself checking the progress every couple of minutes. I felt like an expecting father, and was unreasonably excited when, at 25%, I could finally see a rectangular something at the bottom of the assimilation chamber.

The rectangle grew, bit by bit, and I realized it was the backplate of a metal casing. Gradually before my eyes, the walls of the casing came into form, then the front, with holes for a screen and buttons. Wires and a core appeared inside of the casing, before being hidden behind a holo screen and buttons, completing the front of the device. I checked the progress and we were only at 80%. I couldn’t tell what else needed to be done, but rewriting matter was a complicated process (I assumed) so I was just going to let the thing do whatever it needed.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

A couple of torturous hours later, the lights abruptly turned off, and I realized it was dark outside already. I’d spent a while hanging up some of the work lights I’d lifted from the mines, and no longer would have to live in pitch blackness after night fell, but that only worked if I remembered to turn them on. I fumbled around in the dark until I found one and turned it on, not even bothering to turn on the others before checking the mass-fab.

“Assimilation complete,” read the display. When I opened the cabinet, the machine helpfully chimed at me “*Ding* Assimilation complete.” How droll.

There, looking exactly as it had a couple hours ago, was an I-have-no-idea. Rectangular, about the size of my palm, dominated by a large holo with several buttons on the front, and otherwise just a plain metal case. Archaic design, to have separate buttons and holo, pretty much everything I’d ever seen had a touch-holo and digital buttons.

Still, it was nice to see metal somewhere that wasn’t 95% rusted over, and, when I tapped the on button, was nice to see a device which just worked.

Still had no idea what it did, though.

The display just showed a circle which oscillated between large and small. Some kind of idle screen, or an obscure progress bar? None of the other buttons seemed responsive, although I could turn it on and off.

Man, what a great find. This thing was about as useless as the machine which spawned it. I had to wonder if the build was corrupted after all.

I put it down, and left it for tomorrow. It was getting late. I had all the time in the world out here, and could play with it more tomorrow. With any luck, it was a handheld video game and could keep me from going nuts…or, remembering my adventures with Saga, going more nuts.

I woke up to a low-pitched beep. More like a long flat robotic “Booooop.” As I laid in the dark wondering what that noise could have been, it happened again. “Booooop.”

Well, shit, now I was awake. I tried to ignore it but it sounded like it was going off every 20 seconds like clockwork. “Booooop. Booooop. Booooop.”

Finally my annoyance overcame my fatigue and I rolled out of my hammock to shut off the damn thing. I knew exactly what it had to be, considering there were only two functioning electronic devices within god-knows how many miles of here. I went to the handheld useless device and saw that the screen now showed not only the growing and shrinking circle, but also a white dot. Every time the circle passed the dot, it would make that stupid noise. “Booooop.”

I hit the power button but now the device didn’t care about my input anymore. Damn thing was possessed. I turned it over in my hands, pushing all the buttons with exactly the same level of effectiveness. I considered breaking it or just throwing it outside, but after all the work I’d put into making it, and now it was finally doing…whatever it was supposed to do. “Booooop.”

In my not-awake state, I just sat there staring at the damn thing in my hand in the dark for what felt like an hour, willing it to shut up with the power of pure hatred. When that inevitably failed and I woke myself up with some water and a bit of starting-to-turn-gross pork, I realized that as I turned the device in my hand, the orientation of the white dot remained constant. No matter which way I pointed the device, it always put the white dot somewhere northwest of me. “Booooop.”

So…some kind of radar? But what was it detecting.

The sun was barely creeping over the trees, and I wasn’t going to get any sleep anyway, so I grabbed an empty bag, threw some of my scarce remaining food in it, and headed out.

Thankfully, it wasn’t that far away. As I moved towards the white dot, the device got more and more excited. “Booooop. Booooop. Booooop.” I felt this was more a punishment than a reward.

Finally, in the middle of the forest northwest of The Bunker, still at the edge of the facility ruins, I crossed paths with the white dot. The device boop’ed its excitement at about second intervals now. I saw nothing here, but started to poke around in the brush. “Booooop.”

Running my fingers through the dirt, I felt something at the base of a tree, cold and metallic. Was this it? Some hidden cache? A GPS transponder? A big ol’ box of jerky? I could dream I guess.

Whatever it was, it was mostly buried in the dirt, a large rectangular angular box, made of some metal I wasn’t able to identify, but which was not rusted through. There was a big hole, seemingly burned in the front, and faded writing I could make out around the hole.

“AEGIS,” I read, scrubbing dirt off with my thumb.

“Y-yes? Hello? Is someone there?” I heard a voice tinged with desperation, with the same familiar choking I’d heard from myself recently. “Is…is someone there? Hello? Anyone?”

“Hello?” I asked. I was already getting tired of talking to disembodied voices.

“Oh my god, someone’s there!” The voice was tinny and weak, as though coming out of an old speaker from a broken toy. “Help, please! I’ve been stuck here so long.”

I kept sweeping the dirt from the box and uncovered enough of it to get a general shape. It was a big rectangle, metal, about a foot and a half wide and slightly less deep. The top of the box angled inward slightly and there were a number of ports for hooking up to things, none of which I recognized. There was what looked like a lens and microphone, and some black metal disc on top. Everything was caked with packed dirt, and I didn’t think any of it would function without a good cleaning at the very least. Experimentally, I wiped out the lens with my thumb and removed most of the packed-in dirt.

“Oh! Oh! I can see! I can see you!” the voice said. She was so excited her voice was breaking. “Oh thank god! Thank you! Thank you so much! I haven’t seen or heard from anyone in years. Years and years and years!” And then it seemed to become too much for her, and she just started sobbing incoherently.

“Woah, woah, please don’t cry. I’m here for you. You just gotta let me know what’s going on and I’ll help you, okay?” I said, trying to get more out of her and distract her from crying. Girls crying made me very nervous.

“Yeah, okay. Thank you. So much. Um, I don’t remember much, but my name–“

And then she went silent.