The engineer wakes with a jolt, the disparate shards of his mind once more forced into a single location and being, he had slept in his armor and while his mouth was dry he was fully hydrated and did not need to eat, all the uncomfortable feelings were immaterial.
A quick check of the incident log over the night showed nothing that needed immediately addressed, more outposts had been attacked, some had fallen, a new construction facility was created to make more drones and turrets, already present production lines were expanded, steel production was up 15 percent, iron production was up 10 and consumption was up 12, copper production was down 3 percent because a mining outpost had been destroyed. More and more figures and facts flowed through his mind and were dismissed, production would increase and the bugs would be fought off or they would die. The details could be handled by the minds.
The armor's diagnostic systems returned an all clear and 20 seconds after waking up the engineer moved for the first time that day, daily hygiene could be taken care of later and sterilization lights ensured no microscopic life could survive inside of the suit. When you lived constantly in a sterile environment, such as a sealed environmental suit, you didn’t exactly get dirty, just a build up of dead skin, oil and the like. A quick shower at the end of the day could handle that fine.
A few extra seconds taken to approve or deny any of the mind's pending requests, now that he had a decent understanding of the current state of the factory he could make more informed decisions. The minds only needed active approval for a few tasks, and it was more often asking for criticism or another opinion than asking if they could do something in the first place.
In the early days he had needed to correct mistakes fairly often, the minds had learned though and now it was a rare occasion any changes needed to be made, even if sometimes changes could be made and things could be improved. The minds had taken what he instinctively knew and turned it into a repeatable pattern.
When the first sinkholes from overmining started appearing only the buildings the engineer had designed himself had stayed operational, as they had been made with the eventual sinkholes in mind, even if neither he or the minds had known they would occur. So now it was standard practice for the engineer to look over building plans and note anything that felt “wrong”.
His instinct with building and engineering was potent enough that if the minds had been restricted to his own speed of thought he would out build Labyrinthine and out optimize Byzantine, whether slowing the combat minds would make him their equal as well was less certain though, he didn’t exactly have any combat instincts implanted at birth, just optimal turret layouts and the best way to supply said turret wall. Which while technically a combat instinct didn’t really help when you didn’t have turrets or a wall.
The minds weren’t limited to human thought speed though, and so they generally outperformed him by simple virtue of trial and error, Byzantine could make and test ten designs and then refine those same designs in the same time it would take the engineer to make one, even if that one would probably be better than the first ten designs the mind had made.
So the minds would handle the large scale building projects and the engineer would focus on replicable designs, like the skitter bot, or the skitterer. Just design something and let the minds mass produce it and use it for whatever purpose it was designed for.
He was already designing a few dozen minor inventions for the factory, faster conveyer belts, more efficient drones, larger batteries, stronger lasers, new variants of grenades, better assemblers. His own personal workshop was full of random ideas that had sprung into his head, some could be mass produced, some were only viable on a small scale and some just plain didn't work, but it was still his job to try and make more.
Could he have made a mind to handle all of that and leave the engineer to try and find some other thing to spend his time on? Probably, even if the minds aren’t inherently creative they are more than capable of optimizing already existing machinery, either by just using better components or shaving of minute inefficiencies, and if he just gave a simple blueprint with an end function an artificial mind would be able to use its available tools and components to achieve that goal.
There were a few problems with that though, first of which was actually teaching the mind, each mind took about a week to grasp the underlying concepts of their tasks and even longer to actually become proficient with those tasks, a short time for an organic yes but in a war it’s not exactly a quick process, and it’s one the engineer needs to facilitate himself, you can’t automate answering questions or posing problems, teaching is something that needs an intelligence to facilitate optimally. So it couldn’t be automated, at least not without making a mind to make minds.
The next issue is a moral one, sure death was less of a concern now, still a worryingly high chance of dying but not a near certainty. But it would still be bringing sentient life into a world with a certainty that it would be helping fight or fighting itself. Bringing life into the world just so it could struggle to survive with them? When it would only provide minor benefits to the overall effort? Not exactly ideal.
And the main reason was more selfish, it could be argued that it would save more time overall by building the research mind, or even other minds for other tasks. But the engineer didn’t want to. He enjoyed building and inventing, it didn’t really matter what either. He was made to build and design and to engineer. Doing that gave him joy, watching the first products pour from a newly built facility was one of the best moments he could think of.
The only reason he had made minds to build in the first place was that he simply couldn’t be everywhere and he needed to be. So he designed something that could be everywhere.
The simple answer was that he didn’t need to design a research mind, nor did he want to. So he simply didn’t make the mind.
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The walk from the workshop to the newly constructed exercise room was short, which was good because he didn’t want to waste too much time on this, and bad because he dreaded actually doing the tests. The day before had been testing how quickly he could absorb objects, and the minds had decided the best way to test that was to fire objects at him and see if he could absorb them before they hit, turns out the answer is sort of and it depends.
It mainly depended on the object's speed and size, a larger and faster object would hit and still impact its force, and depending on the firmness of the object it might just stay attached as part of it was absorbed, holding it up. Or it would fall and look like something had taken a bite out of it.
Today is going to be testing in the same vein, only this time with stationary objects. With varying volume, mass, and complexity.
When the engineer finally arrived at the airlock into the weight room he felt the air get pumped out and the armor's internal air supply switch on, and he felt the suit get hosed down with industrial cleaner through the armor's haptic feedback, the chill getting an involuntary shiver out of him. He really needed to stop the system from sending more extreme sensations, and considering metal was far more conductive than meat cold chilled far deeper and far quicker even at relatively warm temperatures. He had already disabled the pain feedback after the first time he’d been hit with acid, which meant that high heat and cold were only unpleasant rather than debilitating, but still a number for the temp and the general idea of hot, cold, or neutral was good enough.
The decontamination cycle took 3 minutes, enough to get the bulk of the contaminants off the armor. Just because you can handle being full of toxins doesn’t mean you should just stop caring about it. And the engineer finally stepped out of his armor, the front opening and rods sprouting from the legs and torso so he had somewhere to climb down from.
He could still absorb through the suit, but it was slower and messed with the readings. And so the mind made him perform the absorption tests in nothing but underclothes, as clothes caused the same problem, just to a lesser degree. He’d have been fully nude but he wasn’t exactly testing the speed of absorption from the crotch today, individual body parts came later, as did the tests for if increased skin contact increased absorption speed.
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The room was plain, all the exercise equipment had been removed, leaving only sensors and a series of cubes. All of differing size and material, some were metal cubes with small imperfections and carving, some were mixes of metal and plastic with interlocking components, some had wiring and light bulbs, batteries, both solid and liquid. And somewhere simple hollow wooden or metal cubes.
There must have been over 80 different cubes in the room, the smallest barely a millimeter and the largest 2 and a half meters tall, and was that cube spitting out electricity? And he swore that one just spat fire.
The minds were definitely through when it came to testing. And with his inbuilt shields they didn’t need to be overly cautious with safety concerns.
Byzantine, being the most data minded of the minds, was in charge of the tests. The other minds were still watching yes, but they were not running anything.
The first test was with a single one pound iron cube, a baseline of sorts. And for the first time the engineer really watched as the metal of the cube flowed into his skin, it didn’t really feel like anything, just the cool sensation of metal moving. Like if he had just drug his hand over a metal surface, but instead of going across the feeling was inward.
The entire cube vanished, it just sank below the skin, and after a second or so it was gone entirely. Then with a thought the cube began flowing back out, slowly rising from just above the skin and returning to its previous shape. In fact if the engineer was watching and hadn’t known the cube was liquified he would have thought it had just risen as a solid, whatever forces allowed the object to be absorbed also held the liquid version of the object in the same shape as it had originally been.
This implied a few things, that his pocket dimension had memory, that it could scan objects to know what shape they should be in, and that it could project itself from further than his skin, even if it couldn’t absorb from anything past that distance.
The next few tests were similar, just solid cubes of varying sizes, nothing of interest happened until he got to one of the larger cubes, when they could no longer sink into his hand as a full cube the look of it being a solid sinking into his skin changed, the edges of the cube melted as they were pulled towards his skin. It still didn’t take long for the entire object to be absorbed through, only a few milliseconds longer than the smaller cubes. And when it was pulled from the pocket dimension or spatial compression or wherever it went it flowed into its original shape.
The largest cube showed this best, as the whole thing just collapsed towards his hand as he rested it on top of the cube, the liquid metal actually flowing upwards and defying gravity, and even though he should have felt a few hundred pounds on his arm he felt nothing but a light tug and that same sensation of flowing metal. The bigger cube had even started to flow up and had begun covering his hand as he absorbed it, seemingly to absorb itself quicker with more surface area, but later tests would prove or disprove that.
After the largest cube nothing of note really happened, cubes were absorbed and spat out in the same shape they had been absorbed in and the engineer sent most of his attention towards designing a new generator for the courier drones, for better fuel use and an increased power yield. More power meant more shields and stronger lasers and all that.
And after the cube testing had finished it was onto the grip strength testing, both the metal fingers and normal ones. The other augmentations had already partially merged with his body from whatever had happened, and something could have changed with the metal ones, maybe the bones and skin connecting them had gotten stronger? He’d need to check the medical scans, but it hadn’t been anything extreme or one of the minds would have pointed it out.
A grip strength of 220 pounds was impressive for his un augmented hand, and the strength of 350 pounds for his metal augmented hand was a bit absurd, but nothing too far outside the expected range, improvements yes, but not impossible ones. And if the engineer needed more grip strength he’d just get some mechanical clamps and attach them to his arm with another clamp. Or put on the power armor that had over 15000 pounds of crushing force, which is plenty sufficient for grip strength, considering it had been designed to be used as a weapon if necessary.
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The fighting on the frontier had been growing with intensity at a much higher rate than originally expected, and while Bulwark knew that was because a command bug had started organizing attacks it didn’t change the fact that the attacks were increasing and new bug variants were appearing at a never before seen rate.
Already today he had logged 3 new combat forms, a jumping bug with a spear on its front that would launch itself into the sky to either spear flying drones or to crash down and stab turrets or tanks, a bug that could take the appearance of anything it was near, usually trees or rocks. One had managed to get fairly close to the wall by pretending to be a boulder thrown by an explosion, it was only because a boulder hitting the wall would damage it that the “boulder” had been destroyed, showing it to be a bug.
And then the third variant, one that was currently causing the mind a fair bit of trouble as it rushed towards the wall, shrugging off the hail of bullets, fire, and explosions that tore off chunks of its carapace.
It resembles a centipede, with hundreds of legs and a segmented body, if each segment on a centipede had eyes and other sensory organs. And If one ignored that it was over 150 feet long and surely weighed a few hundred tons.
The size wasn’t the problem though, if it had just been large it would easily been taken down by a hail of larger explosives or cannon shells, no Bulwark noted the actual problem as the ‘head’ of the creature was torn asunder for what had to be the fifth time, it was that each segment was fully capable of moving and attacking on its own, and when ever its ‘head’ was destroyed the segment just behind it would take over its job.
Each segment being its own enclosed system meant that a large bug's main disadvantage, that it was hard to miss, was lessened. Hitting one part of the bug only hurt that segment, and if a segment died it wouldn’t hurt the whole.
Bulwark had blown the whole creature in half 4 times already, and each time the ends just met up and reformed into the massive creature again. It had been 220 feet long, which meant that Bulwark was killing it, just slowly. And slowly would work considering it would come within range of the wall within ten more seconds, and it didn’t look much like the wall would slow it down for long.
Already ports on the creature had opened to spit acid at the wall, draining its shields and making it easier for the bug to eventually tear a hole in it. Already distractor drones had been marshaled towards the most likely breach location, but 30, 50 pound drones had little chance of stopping something that large, even with the volume of fire they could pour out.
If it had just been the centipede Bulwark would have had no issues taking it apart piece by piece, but the bug wasn’t only, thousands of other insects charged with it, and if he ignored those they would also breach the wall, or they’d breach with the centipede. The outpost was all but lost already, but losing it without killing as many bugs as possible was unthinkable. As long as the turrets could fire they would, as long as a drone remained it would fight. And when the drones and turrets all fell the outposts reactor would be detonated, killing all the bugs near the base.
That was the actual plan, if bulwark stopped firing the bugs wouldn’t close at full strength. They’d know he planned to detonate the outpost and would only send the bare minimum of bugs at the outpost to breach the walls and wreck the internals, just in case it was a bluff.
But if the outpost fought like it thought it could win the bugs would press further and surround the outpost, letting it take out as many as possible before it detonated.
Still losing this outpost would set back the perimeter construction by 3 hours, so losing it was ideal, and there was still a chance the mind could drive the bugs back, it was just unlikely.
When the centipede struck the wall the entire outpost shook, ammo and more falling from some of the closer conveyor belts, and the walls shield began to rapidly drain before Bulwark disabled the shields from that section of wall, the moment the shields fell chunks began to be torn from the concrete and within seconds the bug was through.
Immediately 120 lighting casters hit the bug in the face, and incinerated a segment, but more and more of the bug poured through and closed the distance on the drones faster than they could vaporize the bug, some of the distractors fell to acid even before the centipede reached close quarters, and when the bug did it was basically over for the distractors, for all their durability they couldn’t survive being torn asunder or stabbed through.
It could have been worse though, interceptor and destroyer drones were keeping the rest of the bugs from entering through the same breach and the turrets were still keeping the bulk of the horde as a distance as the piles of bodies grew larger, the only thing that was actually doing damage was the centipede, and that was only really wrecking the internals wall the inner turrets tried to kill it. And the internals were only really important for the turrets that needed electricity to function short term, cannon, gun, and Flammer turrets had enough battery power to work for a few days without power, only the magnetic, radiation, or laser turrets needed constant power supply to work.
So at least half the defense’s would stay operational as long as the walls and ammo held out. And if the centipede, now at 100 feet and 20 segments, could be killed before it took out all the internals then even more of the turrets would stay online, and with the bug dead Labyrinthine could probably repair most of the wiring and could get the turrets working again. It’d only take a few seconds for a drone to fly a new power conduit over the wrecked areas and to splice it into the walls again.