Spidertron V2 03 knew something was wrong, something with its creator. The schematics it had been born with of its creator did not match his current shape, and his emotional reading were far more erratic than the outlines said they should be. It knew creations like the minds were responsible for this, and protocol dictated forwarding the information to them.
So spidertron 03 searched, through everywhere it could reach. From the depths of the factory, to the furthest patrol distance it could reach, every inch of the factory's network was scoured through for any trace of the minds, for someone to report too. Only traces and mentions were found, places the spidertron knew they should have been, missing like a gaping wound freshly torn open and crudely patched.
When its own searches failed to find anything the spidertron conscripted the other mechanical beings that called the factory home, spidertron V2 04 and hundreds of drones joined in the search, looking places that a single machine couldn't hope to search on its own.
Machine holdouts were purged and the remains were investigated, android resistance camps were searched, peaceful machine villages were combed through, satellite and orbital scans peered down from orbit monitoring a large swath of the planet.
But there were no minds to be found.
If the minds could not be found or no longer existed then protocol had failed and the spidertron's needed to do what they were made for, the spidertrons would need to adapt in order to fix their creator, physically and mentally.
And the first step to fixing a problem was understanding it, the few beings with near human emotion were noted to be the androids.
This warranted study. Emotional baselines and variances needed to be understood.
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9S was sneaking around the factory, though if one had asked him that isn't the way he would have put it. After all, the engineer had never said he couldn't go anywhere, and had only ushered 9S and the other scanners out when they went somewhere they weren't supposed to. Never actually forbidding exploration.
The scanners had a competition going on who could get the furthest into the engineers base before one of the minds asked them to leave. Privately 9S thought that most of them did it on the slim chance they'd find the human and he'd talk to them a bit before asking them to leave.
It had always been somewhat easy to sneak around, the doors were rarely locked and the paths to their destinations were usually clear. The human hadn't cared that they were sneaking around, not like YoRHa command did, if anything he or the minds were encouraging it, hiding things to collect or find either in the systems or in obscure locations in the factory.
It had been…. Fun, to relax and play a sort of game with all the other scanners.
The human was kind and thoughtful, odd sure, but he was everything 9S imagined a human would be, and somehow even more.
Things had changed though, after the machine attack. Doors that had once been unlocked, or locked with mechanisms so easy to hack it had to be intentional, were firmly shut, but no matter where they went the human never showed up to tell them to leave, and without the minds it meant they nearly had free roam of the factory.
Most of the other scanners had stopped snooping around once they realized, either because the puzzles weren't there in the first place, or because the human wasn't playing along anymore.
He hadn't been the same since the battle, and 9S was investigating just how much the human had changed, by going somewhere the scanners had never dared to go.
The humans bedroom.
But first he had to get away from 2B. She wasn't fond of 9S snooping around the human's factory in the first place. They had been spending most of their time off mission patrolling the area around the humans factory, and it wouldn't take much effort to get out of that.
9S turned too 2B as they entered the barracks set aside for YoRHa androids "I won't be able to join your for today's patrol, I have some analysis work I need to get done" Lying too 2B felt wrong, but it wasn't about anything significant, 2B nodded at that, a small frown on her face "acknowledged, I will complete the patrol without you" the cold words stung though 9S didn't know why.
Still his course had been set, and 9S went to his quarters while waiting for 2B to set out on her patrol, after just a few minutes he figured it was clear and made his way to where the warm hues of the barracks dimmed into the cold metal halls of the factory. Something else that had changed, before everything in the factory had been well lit and every surface had been covered in beautiful works of art.
Now it was just sleek gray metal with only the dimmest of lighting, foreboding and all too similar to the machine bases 9S had been in before.
The halls themselves were dark gray and barren, no androids were inside the factory and 9S walked past dozens of empty storage rooms before coming into the factory proper. It was back to the way it had been in the first few days, not a single walkable path through the tangle of machines, each moving in a smooth almost rhythmic pattern.
Belts and inserters ferried resources into massive machines that turned them into yet more pieces for even larger tools, but 9S didn't stay starring long; he only had a limited amount of time before 2B would make it back from patrol and seek him out.
It took nearly an hour for 9S to work his way passed the bulwark of metal machines that had blocked his path, the dim lighting and cramped conditions meant that his outfit had gotten tangled and torn on more than one occasion and his arms and legs were covered in faint scratches, only slowly filling in as his healing took effect.
It was only then that he realized he hadn't seen a singular drone, the entire factory was operating without the logistics drones that once ferried resources throughout it. Instead the belts had just grown even more twisted and tangled to account for their loss.
Still now that he had gotten past the main production area it should be a relatively short walk to the workshop and then the bedroom would be only minutes away, the door out of the factory and into the workshop was locked but it was nothing that 9S couldn't disarm. The inbuilt defenses marking him as friend and not detonating when the door was forced open by an unauthorized user.
The workshop was empty, and most of the tools and equipment looked like they hadn't been touched since before the battle. The only new addition to the room being an ominous staircase on one half of the room. 9S didn't waste any time exploring the room, instead heading straight for the door, speed walking with a slight crouch and making sure his footfalls were silent.
The door wasn't even locked, though it was still ornamented, unlike the other doors which had taken on the sleek gray design that had infected the bulk of the factory. The golden and silver etching seemed to radiate warmth, the image of the engineer on it seeming happy and relaxed as he rested behind a caricatured wall of turrets and drones, free of his armor and resting on a soft looking bed.
The humans being obsessed with gold made more sense if one considered how beautiful it could be in artworks.
The actual room looked little like the picture, the bed was smaller and the human obviously hadn't been in the room, but 9S stalked in anyway, the door gently shutting behind him. Just as the door clicked to show it had sealed shut a familiar voice echoed out, seeming absurdly loud with the previous quiet and 9S nearly jumped out of his clothes. 2B's voice sounded out from where she had been standing against the wall. "Just what do you think you're doing?" 9S slowly turned towards her, trying to formulate some excuse that could get him out of trouble. "Uhhhh….. Trying to ask the human some questions to help with my analysis?" 2B's frown deepened her voice, somehow even more fridged than before "I contacted command, you haven't been tasked with analyzing anything. And everyone knows the human hasn't said a word since the battle."
9S nearly shouted then his voice rushed and emotional "That's just it! The human hasn't said anything! He hasn't eaten or left his armor and if the state of this room is anything then he hasn't even slept! We have to do something….." 2B's face softened slightly, though 9S may have been imagining it. "And that's why I joined you here, rather than just reporting it to command. How did you even plan to solve the problem by sneaking in here?" 9S rubbed the back of his neck, not actually having had a plan beyond 'investigation' 2B seemed to notice his hesitation "you didn't have a plan did you?" 9S shook his head "no, but we might as well look through everything while where here"
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2B sighed before starting to walk towards the closet on the wall, opening it and starting to leaf through the clothes inside. All the same skin tight suits that the engineer had been handing out to the androids and the only outfit 9S had ever seen him in.
That was quite literally the only thing in the closet, and the only other piece of furniture in the room was the untouched bed. Its covers actually had a thin layer of dust. Something the rigorous cleaning the drones constantly performed wouldn't allow. The bed only had a single pillow and a single thin blanket. And when 9S looked under the covers he saw the mattress was barely an inch thick, resting on a firm slab of metal.
There was a container under the bed though, and 9S pulled it out. Opening it revealed robotic arm attachments for the drones, hair brushes, scissors, tooth brushes, scrub brushes and what looked like a hair drier. The only other thing was a few bottles that smelled like they contained soap.
He turned over to 2B, who had finished checking the closet for anything hidden among the clothes. "Nothing over here but some toiletries, did you find anything over there?" 2B shook her head "just the same jumpsuit, not even any other pieces of clothing." there probably wasn't anything in the bathroom either, meaning this trip had been a bust.
Just as he was about to say that too 2B she turned her gaze towards the walls. The murals inside were still intact and 9S watched 2B stalk closer to them to get a closer look, 9S had a hard time taking his eyes off of her in order to look at what she saw.
The wall itself was covered in pictures of otherworldly planets and stars, along with twisting vistas of vines and flowers all crafted of rare metals and gems, but running around the room in a band were a series of murals much like those that used to be in the main factory. the ones that the scanners had used to craft what they called 'the human mythos', or the legend of the humans survival on that other world. it was one of these murals that had 2B's attention.
It was an image of the engineer, like so many of the murals were, but he was injured and frowning in this one. Looking sick and like he was coughing up blood, the blood itself glittering with the ruby dust it was made from. Following the murals line it lead to the engineer getting carried into a room full of what 9S thought looked like a worrying amount of needles and saws on robotic arms. The depiction of the engineer on the table full of wires and tubes as life was quite literally pumped back into him. By the next panel the engineer was looking larger and stronger, and a slight smile was on his face.
9S muttered under his breath, "well that's a hint if I've ever seen one" and 2B nodded, startling 9S a little. "It seems we need to find this machine and convince the engineer to use it"
Neither of the pair noticed the drone watching them from the ductwork, nor the spidertron that was watching from the drones eyes.
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Log #98
I made a discovery of some import while researching the area where the portal to Nauvis used to be. Something that pertains to every single aspect of the factory and answers the numerous questions that plagued my mind. It tells of why the decoders show images of things unrelated to napalm while researching how to improve it, why my tech works better than it reasonably should. It answers where all the excess material my products consume goes, and it tells me exactly what the liquids are, as well as how the shields and projectors work.
My factory does not work in only 3 spatial dimensions and one temporal dimension, it also operates in a conceptual dimension. The decoders show images of wood fire, magma, and other combustibles while trying to improve napalm because that's not what's improving. It's improving my ability to craft things that better embody the concept of 'fire'. My shields and projectors embody two halves of the concept of 'malleability' or the ability for something to be changed.
The science packs condense parts of the factory down into distilled concepts, everything about the factory. And the decoders peer into this conceptual dimension and use this understanding of the factory's whole to improve aspects of it.
Automation, logistics, military, chemical, production, utility, and once the factory had expanded into space, space. The core of the factory is automation, logistics is how everything in the factory flows and moves, military is how the factory ensures it can grow without being destroyed, chemical embodies all the reactions the factory uses to make things, production is what all the things beneath are put towards, and utility is what the products are for, being used, space embodies the limitless potential of the factory for growth, it's why it sped up my research, space is possibility itself.
With this greater understanding of how my technology works I can begin figuring out how to open the portal back to Nauvis, without the production and resources the planet offers my current position is untenable. There simply aren't enough resources in this planets mined out crust to engage in full scale production and I do not have enough infrastructure to build mantel miners.
Not to mention the fact that even if I had enough resources I lack the production capacity to maintain my current usage of supplies. The outpost on the exact opposite side of the portal handled most of the production for this base's defensive network, something that wasn't considered a liability given that with the portal present they were practically the same base.
If the portal is not opened or if another solution is not found the factory's operations will terminate, such an outcome is not acceptable.
Another avenue of continued operation is to eliminate the current threat to the factories running, the self replicating machine swarm while a good source of scrap metal is rapidly becoming a true threat. As evidenced by the closing of the portal and the direct assault and elimination of all but one of my outposts.
The captured AI fragment has been of some use in concocting a method of dealing with this impediment. I have automated an algorithm to continually refine a digital weapon against the AI, granting it more processing capability as the weapons grows in effectuality. The AI's desire to continue its own operation forcing it to develop countermeasures in a manner hopefully similar to how the main AI will react to a similar attack. Using the information I am making a weapon that can weave its way through any possible defense the AI can mount.
Then I just need to infect enough of the machines connected to the network at once in order to infect the AI directing them in a large enough portion that the weapon can propagate through its systems.
I have also begun working on upgrades for the android defenders I acquired. They are already capable of installing chips to modify how they function, adding my upgrades to a similar format will be the easiest method.
These in addition to the armaments' I am supplying them with will allow the androids to shoulder the bulk of the work in defending the factory, the integration of the 'resistance' androids to a main database also allows the androids combat data to be downloaded into new units upon their deaths. Greatly increasing android combat efficiency on the broader level.
The materials I am studying are providing a wealth of data on practical application of this reality's unique technologies. These 'machine-droids' have the most advanced implementations of it I have yet seen. Already I have begun using parts harvested from them to augment my own cybernetics and suit, showing a marked improvement in my speed, durability, and power.
Implementing this on a larger scale will be impossible until I can produce my own components, the rate the materials are regrown is too slow for adequate throughput.
These new discoveries will improve the factories ability to grow and exploit this new resource.
all physical functionalities are currently nominal.
That ends this report.