Miles underground a node of the machine network sits processing the information from thousands of different machines, either in their fights against the androids or in countless experiments, ever growing and refining itself as it has been for thousands of years.
Lately the fights had been giving even more information than usual, the androids having been strengthened by the forces of YoRHa, increasing the speed the machine network could test and improve itself. This was well and good, some of the best lessons were in defeat and without periodic reinforcements the androids could not routinely win battles.
And if they were ever in any true danger YoRHa could be disabled, a simple and safe way to grow and learn.
The feeds of machines fighting a new force working in conjunction with a squad of YoRHa androids though? Well the humans were right about the greatest fear being of the unknown, something the machine network hadn’t seen before had shown up, an unexpected variable.
The only thing to do then would be to learn of and account for this variable, and if it was a threat eliminate it, if it wasn't? Well surely something could be learned.
It presumably came from beyond the portal, the one the network had scouted out. But that place had been full of giant insects, not machines.
Nearby machines were sent orders to slowly ‘wander’ into the areas that had been claimed by this new force, information needed to be gathered before any overt action was taken.
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Balistraia was learning, fighting the bugs was an ever growing challenge yes, but it was a growing challenge. Fighting the machines? It was like learning to fight all over again, no tactics or plans to build off of. All of her tactics against the bugs had been grown from those first few the engineer had taught her.
Now she needed to build her own foundational strategies, well saying that the destroyer drone network was taking strategies from the androids and pods. But those were on an individual scale, she didn’t need to know how to fight a machine, she needed to know how to fight The Machines.
How to claim and hold territory, how they would react to attacks, if they would adapt or if similar strategies could be repeated without risk. All the information needed to wage a war needed to be gathered as quickly as could be managed.
So she sent drones out to fight and watched, and she learned.
There were a few restrictions she was working under, she couldn’t start a fight, only retaliate. She was to avoid significant structural damage to the surrounding city, she was to allow machines to retreat if they tried, and she was to avoid collateral damage wherever she could.
It was some of the most excitement she had gotten in weeks, it wasn’t that fighting the bugs had gotten boring or unrewarding. Defending the factory was and always would be the thing that fulfilled her most, but getting to fight an entirely new foe in an entirely new place? She was learning so much so quickly, gaining so many minute improvements at a rate she hadn’t since she was first created, that she couldn’t help but want more new things to fight and experience.
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Labyrinthine was a passive mind, they did not go out of their way to do things, they solved problems and repaired damages, and they helped the other minds with their own plans. The closest the mind got to having initiative was adding light’s to the factories so that its artwork could be better seen.
The other minds had directives that forced them to take proactive actions, Bulwark needed to have defenses ready before attacks, Byzantine needed to make plans and take action to ensure more resources were secured before the current supply ran out, Balistraia however was the best example, a mind created to go out and stop threats before they could threaten the factory.
Labyrinthine however, they repaired the damage after it had already been done, they refined and improved blueprints after the other minds already designed them, they fulfilled said blueprints after they had been created.
Even its pastime, the aforementioned artwork was a task given to it by it’s maker, not something it had chosen to do of its own volition “make the factory beautiful” was an order the mind often though on, partially do to how vague it was and partially because the mind often wondered if it was succeeding at the order.
But there was one thing to note about that order, it was to make “the factory beautiful” not anything outside of its bounds. Why then was the mind sending hundreds of construction drones into the safe areas of the city? Why were they cleaning up rubble and fixing broken roads and buildings?
Sure they could say it was to secure scrap metal and other resources, but that was Byzantine’s job, they could say it was to clear the roads so that vehicles could travel, but that was Balistraia’s or Bulwarks job, at least to plan. And Labyrinthine had started cleaning before any of the other minds had asked them to.
The minds thought while its drones largely handled the task of cleanup and repair without its intervention, and came to a surprising simple conclusion. The world outside the factory was ugly here, sure where nature had reclaimed the land were spots of tolerability. But to a machine's sensibilities the discordant nature of the ruins were an affront.
Nature was beautiful, a cycle of birth and death. Ever shifting, growing, and changing. Labyrinthine took much inspiration from the lands outside the factory on Nauvis for its artwork.
The factory was beautiful, even without Labyrinthine’s work. A massive web of interconnected parts, everything had a purpose and place. The rivers of metals flowing throughout a massive complex of machines all working in harmony.
Even the biters were beautiful in their own way.
But these ruins? They served no purpose, they did nothing but stifle nature and prevent the factory from growing as they should.
So Labyrinthine would take this affront and turn it into something beautiful, even if they hadn’t been told to do so. Just because they wanted to.
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Byzantine was extraordinarily busy, busy enough that they had expanded their processing capabilities by 20 percent just to cope with the increased demand. First they had needed to organize supplying an outpost a thousand miles away through hostile territory. Difficult but manageable, especially as a railway had already been made for the outpost.
Then they found they would need to supply an entire new warfront through that rail line, currently the outpost at the portal did not have the throughput needed for anything more than the maintaining of a singular outpost, so they needed to design a plan to get the resources to the outpost, a blueprint for unloading those trains, another for getting those resources through the bottleneck of the portal.
All of that would have taken the mind at most an hour, they were more than proficient at their task.
No, what was currently taking up most of the mind's processing power was the fact they would need to get said supplies to hundreds, if not thousands or possibly millions, of disparate ‘resistance camps’. Without either losing a majority of supplies to the machines, which were everywhere, or using trains and distribution centers, of which they had none.
The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.
That wasn't even the extent of the task, they also had to figure out what supplies those androids would need and how much each outpost would want or require. And they had to figure out what each piece of equipment was worth and what they would take in exchange for it.
They could and would be giving out supplies for free, but the maker had specified that giving the androids simple tasks to do in order to get the equipment would trick the androids into thinking that simple safe tasks like gathering scrap metal were integral to him and his factory. Their programming to serve and help humans would then kick in, making them want to help the engineer by sending scrap metal. And in turn they would avoid fighting the machines, theoretically.
Byzantine figured that would work until the safe places to gather scrap ran out, then the androids would start fighting to get scrap in more dangerous locations. It was also their job to change the payment options before that could happen.
This whole system was founded on the idea that any camp within distance to actually be supplied would also be in range to be protected by the factory.
All of this was a stop gap until the citadel was constructed, which would house the majority of androids in japan and keep them safe. There was a bit of danger in putting all the androids in one place though. The whole situation was developing and changing on a minute by minute basis. In a week the citadel plan might even be scrapped as unviable.
If it hadn’t been for the new plants and animals on the planet Byzantine would have considered the whole thing as pointless, but the fact that they had needed to build a whole new complex just to house all the different plants and animals they had gathered.
They weren’t trying to recreate the natural environment though, instead they were learning what the plants and animals needed to survive, and what they produced. The engineer had enjoyed the first fruits of the gardens, and ever since Byzantine had been making an effort to expand and increase the quality of what they could grow.
This new world had been an unexpected windfall in that department, on Nauvis everything on the surface was inedible without significant work, and it was the rare fish that could be eaten without first removing toxins or poisons. But here? The bugs were edible, the leaves on the plants were edible, the animals were edible. Byzantine had seen a tree producing fruits! Fresh legumes that could grow without extensive care.
Already they had their eyes on a herd of moose that Balistraia had spotted. They had tranquilizers, originally intended for use on the bugs, and had sent the stocks from storage along with a few drones that could use them.
Now they just needed to figure out what the energy that was emitting from the plants was, and if it was harmful to consume.
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Bulwark was anxious, the engineer was in a new place, one without the extensive defense of even the average outpost, much less the main factory. They knew that Balistraia could handle the defense just fine, but their current limitations of only a scant few turrets and artillery pieces were grating.
Never before had the mind been able to see an enemy and not been able to attack it due to a weapon simply not being there, at least excepting when all of its weapons had been destroyed and the outpost was on the brink anyway. And they imagined they’d feel similar if the engineer was in said outpost.
Sure they had designed walls and made the best of the situation to give the best defense possible, but the fact remained that most of that defensive plan was on Balistraia and not Bulwark, leaving the oldest mind with little to do except watch as she defended the outpost, and occasionally shoot down a group of flyers or a machine that walked into range of the few turrets defending the streets.
The latter only happened when Balistraia let the machine through knowing there was a turret there to stop it.
Still the mind knew that sometimes the only thing to do was wait, eventually a proper outpost would be built and the engineer would be protected by a wall, turrets, and a proper killing field.
Well wait and turn every approach to the pseudo outpost into a deathtrap with pits, spikes, and landmines. Even if they didn’t have turrets they could still control landmines so that they only blew up machines.
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Up in orbit in the central hub of YoRHa sat O37, she like all other type-O’s was paired with a ground unit, she however had been paired with a group, not too uncommon for a temporary group to get a similarly temporary operator to relay information and updates.
It wasn’t uncommon for those same groups to get wiped out and the operator to get assigned to a new individual or group. And after her group had already been missing for three days she assumed it wouldn’t be long before they were listed as mia and she was reassigned.
It was with a fair bit of surprise when she had regained contact with the team, along with a short report from 13S and a longer classified document that was a longer report she didn’t have the clearance to read.
She only knew that the team had gone through the portal, went to the source of the signal while fighting with the natives, and then returned with something classified. Everything beyond that was apparently in the document she was supposed to give directly to the commander.
If 13S hadn’t had a perfect track record she would have still given the report to the commander as was protocol, but she would have been doubtful that anything would come of it besides a reprimand to the both of them for wasting the commanders time. Instead, given 13S’s track record, O37 prepared as best she could for the fallout of whatever information was in that report.
Not that she could do much to prepare, given she had no information and was just an operator.
It was this faint preparation that meant the order for every available combat capable YoRHa android to immediately move to the area around the portal and begin clearing it of machines filled her with only mild surprise. The fact that that was the only part of the mission she could read with her clearance level was odd, sure, but nothing unexpected.
The following orders for the bunkers technicians to begin filling it with a breathable atmosphere was cause for even more gossip among the operators though, all available combat androids just meant that a high priority target or objective had been found. Making the bunker breathable meant that something larger had happened.
When a day passed and she finally saw what had prompted both these actions however she was beyond surprised, the air on the bunker needed to be breathable because the commander had been planning on a human coming to the bunker, the androids had needed to clear out the area to defend a human, and she was currently watching a human be escorted to the commander's office, the fact he was escorted by a bunch of oddly shaped pods, a large metal cat and YoRHa androids in a new type of armor just made it even more surreal.