It’s been awhile since I actually had a reason or need to build something myself, I think the last facility I actually made was the oil well and refinery during the flood. This singularities fondation was easily the biggest thing I had ever made myself, if one could consider my veritable fleet of personal construction bots ‘myself’ which I did, they were fully controlled by my mind. I could make a fair few joke’s about my physical form no longer limiting me but it had barely ever done that, that thin line between my tech and self had just gotten even more frayed, but it wasn’t that noticeable. Besides the fact the drones occasionally act before I tell them too… but that might just be them reading my subconscious.
Or they are becoming sapient… will having them hooked into my mind this closely make a difference?
Our personal drones can be the test group, if we disregard the fact they have enhanced everything. They are the closest to our mind out of any of the drones.
I didn’t stand in the middle directing the show like some grand orchestra, my combat drones had more sensors than my suit, even if they were a lower quality, no, my body worked with the drones, using my construction suits strength and tools where the drones own would have slowed the work. Or on the rarer occasion for this stage, infusing something with a conceptual fluid. The greatest increase in functionality was a five times increase, but a beam that can handle five times the stress it should? Not a minor thing. Not that we are getting to five times, exponential cost is a bastard. One times five support beam costs five hundred beams, four times is only 125 beams.
I darted throughout, using the dozens of cameras to guide my body through the increasing tangle of machinery, at this point even my suit was completely invisible while it worked. My android guards just standing at the door rather than risking entering the room and theoretically breaking something, which was fair enough, this was a place meant to be accessed by flight capable drones, not things on two feet. A defensive feature, but decidedly not up to safety standards.
Nothing we make is, we live in a literal deathtrap. Just one we know how to navigate.
And we LIKE it that way, don’t come inside please and thank you.
I didn’t count, the drones could just carry me or I could make a bridge of hard air, and I actually knew where I could walk.
But this thing was beautiful, it almost felt like it wanted to be created. My hands and mind making minute adjustments to the design as I danced throughout the metal, each piece of myself working in concert to craft this piece of artwork. Eventually I would make something better, but never could I say that I hadn’t done my best with what I had. This would be at the pinnacle of my current ability. Current ability? Yeah but this will be nothing in a few years.
Are we just taking our inspiration as normal or do we blame this on Maso?
We can’t just blame everything on magic, but yes do both.
That doesn't make sense, and we have exhibited such traits since our awakening.
It flowed together over the course of hours, becoming steadily more intricate and complex, the tangle of wires and machines releasing a palpable aura, the Maso of this world being drawn to something this intricate and large. Well within my expectations, the foundation would keep Maso from reaching the singularity while drawing out what little remained inside, making a void of magic on this world. A design I could add to the prisons? It shouldn’t kill anyone and it’d reduce the enhanced strength.
Most of the technology and power systems of this world ran on Maso, the only reason the androids were possible. Maso-tech, without it or another suitable power source they would slow and weaken as their reactors struggled to produce enough magic for them to run on.
This wouldn’t be Maso tech, my sentinels and cites wouldn’t run on something outside themselves. Something I didn’t fully understand, making machines sentient was one thing, that seemed to be a permanent alteration. But relying on something like that to make my tech work in the first place? I think not. Magic is less reliable than science. Relying on whims, I mean here Karma is a notable thing, rage literally makes you stronger, emotions and thoughts affect reality.
No, there would be no Maso used within anything integral to this construction. So I waded through the dense energy and felt it prickle through my own Maso derived enhancements, my mind and muscles running at increased levels without strain. There was potential in cultivating such an environment, but this much Maso would be a danger to the average android. A maso chamber to make enchanted tech. I wouldn’t want magi-tech to be a staple but it has its uses.
A machine designed to use Maso in such concentrations would theoretically have no limits on what it could be designed to do. Magic had no limits, not like the material world, anything could be overcome with sufficient skill and knowledge. Here force of will would grant you greater strength, love was power, Life was made into More, or made outright. Am I the only one thinking about the inner factory potentially being magically alive?
No, but we try to ignore that. I’m of the mind that we accidentally linked all the processors together into a pseudo-intelligence and that the assemblers are smarter than we think.
Are we having conspiracy theories now? Wait no this isn’t new, carry on.
The potential could drive someone insane, it had before, androids falling to madness trying to craft wonders. I had no such weakness, I had been insane and I wasn’t certain I had ever actually stopped. I was made to work and craft wonders, and I didn’t need Maso to do that. Ahh the advantages of not being capable of insanity, madness inducing eldritch truths of reality just don’t bother me that much.
Well they do, but mostly in how they mean I have to rebuild things to account for it.
What happened to our plural speech?
Shut the up and shhhhhhhhhh.
A few final connections, the networks of energy and information being tested, all the emitter and machines coming back as ready for operation then a flick of a mental switch and one of the foundation functions came online the dense Maso forced out of the tangle of machinery and towards the outer edge of machinery, there it was pushed and held, so dense it was opaque and crackling with lighting. The glow would blind most eyes, machine sensors not safe from the blood red light burning with limitless power. That is significantly brighter than we thought, also can we just harvest the lighting to supplement power stores? No? That’s stupid, Magic is stupid.
I just didn’t have any of my machine’s look, and a shell of metal was soon being built on both sides of the Maso shield, leaving it more than enough room to grow even wider. Maso would be flooding in for as long as this Machine was being built, and lesser amounts would arrive as long as it was running, even if the machine wasn’t using this energy the machines defense systems could. This function of the singularity foundation took all radiation and directed it into a dense shell around itself. Not just magic, no energy attacks could breach and any energy gathered would defend against both infiltration and kinetic bombardment. Clever that, pure energy has uses and pure magic is technically that. Just… more glowy and dramatic about it all.
Is it chanting? Is our magic shield wall chanting in an unknown language? We can’t hallucinate right?
Are we actually sure we can’t go insane?
No, we just thought we couldn't get worse.
It just laughed, it just laughed a sinister laugh at us.
Note- make evil mage robot and give it doom fort on the north pole.
The best wall I could craft, one that grew stronger the more force it faced. Another layer to harness the kinetic attacks was Ideal, but combining both those systems wasn’t currently possible.
Now the only way into this machine were the places where access hatches had been made for drones. In an environment with less radiation this system wouldn’t have been effective, on a planet like Nauvis it would have at best given you a severe sunburn. But this earth was magic, and now so was its shield. Already my enhanced systems hit the baseline for earth and started lowering to Nauvis levels, before my body’s own systems engaged. Replacing the Maso generated power with pure energy, not a perfect ratio but a weakness negated. Gonna take longer to build the inner chamber now, but worth it.
I made a note that the Maso shone bright enough to be visible even through multiple inches of armor plating and turned back to my work. A Maso singularity….. What a fun idea, even more viable as a bomb. Honestly rolling out a new batch of power armored suits now that I didn’t need to get them out so rapidly was an appealing idea. The mark ones were the only common armors currently, and while fine for civilian use they were both clunky and weak compared to even my lowest current standard. Wouldn’t that make this our lowest standard?
No, because we have raised that standard now. At minimum a custom tier two for combat androids and a standard mark two for everyone else.
Damn, if money was a concept we had any value in that’d hurt. Still though, gonna take… awhile. A few months at least just to get every ‘combat’ android’s, given how that’s like a full fourth of them still.
Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
We might not have money but we do have a budget, and yes, it will be eating into our income for a bit.
A mark one was good to increase android survivability and drastically amplifying their fighting capabilities, but I could do better, so I would. How would one go about designing power armor for the machines then? Can’t just not but it might be more viable to just design them combat bodies, given it’s relatively easy for them to swap between them. Can I just throw them into spidertrons? Or no… that wouldn’t be cheaper.
Let’s just enhance machine designs so we don’t accidentally fuck something up. Bigger modifications can come after we master how they work.
The potential’s research avenues I now had were tantalizing, already this one project was incorporating all my new ideas in a practical way. I was well beyond my days of burning coal for power. This building alone would have been impossible without everything I had learned on my own, not just the blueprints I had been installed with. I was done working with what they had given me, I was ready for more.
I dove back into my work, my conscious thoughts taking a backseat as intuition and new knowledge guided my efforts, working in concert with every piece of myself. Drones brought parts that needed my attention to me rather than making me stop my own work, and my dozens of part’s were assembled by my thoughts guiding hand and the work sped up. Additions and changes I could only faintly remember installing started appearing. My internal simulations showed an increase in projected effectiveness. All the while I worked at bringing the designs in my mind to life.
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A2 hadn’t wanted to believe it, but her pod didn’t lie and was rarely wrong. The human she had sought out was actually a human. From there her choice was simply, she refused to leave the safety of the human to YoRHa so she took up the mantle of guard. Now rather than her old days of scrounging for supplies from the machines she purged, A2 had enough supplies to drown in, new fitting clothes, and enough weapons to fight anything she could think up.
And she only had to deal with the humans' odd decision to allow machines to live, fine as long as they didn’t bother her or kill any androids, and ignore the YoRHa operator's stares. Nothing but minor inconveniences, her pod had already noted a drastic increase in her combat ability now that she’d let the human actually perform maintenance on her. In fact he had insisted from the moment he had seen her tattered form, and after she had confirmed he was a human and spoken to him for a while, she had let him. Which had been… an experience, an embarrassing one, A2 hadn’t even known she could make those noises. What field maintenance she had done had always been painful, not that.
Years of dust and grime, parts worn down from stress and no-one she trusted to fix it, synth skin long frayed and thin or outright torn replaced. The experience should have been something that happened while she was unconscious, but she didn’t accept that. So she stayed awake through the whole process, the human routing around inside her internals with a deft hand, what should have been painful simply…. Wasn’t. The human had literally taken out her legs skeleton and she had only felt a vague tickling sensation, and her pain sensors were still online. Old wounds had still hurt, even if she had to focus to tell, even old wounds on said leg, only his actions left no pain.
But she couldn’t help but remark that maybe there had been a reason humans had died out as a species. This one seemed terminally stupid, take his actions today for instance, locking himself inside a sphere of condensed energy that in his own words 'possessed enough energy to incinerate basically anything’. She knew he didn’t even have to! The drones were more than capable of building it, he had just wanted to do part of the work himself.
If every human was like this well, A2 was surprised they had lasted long enough to make androids in the first place. This one had to be reminded to eat and sleep! And he had perfect memory and a literal internal clock!
A2 stood in the hallway leading to the ‘fondation’ distinctly not looking at the far too bright light behind her while her pod went on and on about ‘record breaking Maso emissions’ as if she couldn’t physically feel it pushing down on her. It was a palpable amount of power, and she could literally see more Maso flowing past her down the hallway. The tech laced into her body suit buzzed and hissed as a few bare tendrils passed near her before being diverted before they could touch her. And based on the way the trails changed the metal they passed near… It was a good thing the systems kept it from touching her.
This much power was more than enough to power the city above for years, yet the human wanted even more. It was greed plain and simple, more and more and more, A2 doubted he would ever decide he had ‘enough to be done’. But his odd quirks and poor self care didn’t change her self imposed mission, she would see him safe.
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Balistraia took a glance at her commanders mind.
Are we sure that wire goes there?
No, but it can’t hurt, wait no it definitely can.
Doing it anyway, also adding this thing there and here and also over there.
Did that just explode?
Yeah but it was supposed to do that… I think, well it was supposed to combust and thats basically exploding but less. So we did more, and that’s good.
Just gonna pretend anything you said makes sense.
Hey did you notice that the plants outside are growing both larger and faster and that more animals are showing up?
Yeah, magic. What did you expect, it to make sense?
And most of the plants and animals feed on Maso, so we are technically superchargin… that rabbit just popped. Huh.
Well that answers that question, too much Maso makes you go boom.
Too much or too fast?
Can’t rule out either really, no control group and too many variables.
Just gonna assume both.
Hey what's that cult up too?
You're asking now? While we are holding a live wire with more than a cites worth of power running through it?
Gathering near the Maso beam, the drones are keeping them at a safe distance. Also a maso beam has formed.
Still think maso funnel is a better name, I mean it’s draining in maso, or maso tornado.
If we move these generators to the left and rotate them by four degrees we ca-
OPTIMIZE!!!
Yeeeeaaaahhhh!
Yes, as I was saying I think we can optimize this just a bit more
It was business as usual, utter chaos but that was the default. A wonder he functioned at all. Though Balistraia noted the chaos had developed some form of harmony it had not previously held. A storm working towards a goal rather than struggling to grow.
With her hourly check in done Balistraia turned back to her efforts coordinating the courier drones patrols of the coastlines and other locations around hostile machine enclaves. With Panther destroyed and still in the process of being reconstituted Balistraia was once again stuck managing the courier drones, a task in the past partially taken up by the large courier.
Panther might not have had much processing power compared to a mind but the robot certainly knew how to use it. Balistraia had only needed to veto Panther once, from taking all the couriers on a ‘grand hunt’. And Balistraia had only vetoed that as the couriers were an integral part of the Factory’s running.
No, the loss of Panther was still being felt, and even when she was brought back online Balistraia knew Panther would not be the same. Same with any of the rebuilt couriers, a picture repainted with only half of the original to work from. Similar but fundamentally different. Though it did bring up an interesting debate on the nature of a machine's self, Balistraia sent the thoughts to Labyrinthine. That mind enjoyed such madness inducing ideas, philosophy was not something Balistraia was made for.
The only reason she had these thoughts at all was because of just how calm this world was. The Hostile machines only made the token scouting attempt and the droids didn’t even do that much. The most she had done was simply making border agreements and non-aggression pacts, then asking to negotiate other deals later.
She was without any urgent missions or tasks, and While Balistraia knew her other selves beyond the portal were still fighting for their lives and the factories growth here…. It was just a waiting game, the factory would grow without her being needed. So she scouted, documenting each ‘magical’ plant and animal she found, marking down resource nodes and environmental features that could be useful.
And Balistraia found herself simply enjoying exploring this world, with only a few minor threats throughout she felt she could. Walking through ancient ruins and verdant forests with trees to rival skyscrapers. Balistaia couldn’t help but see all it was, and all it could be once the factory proper reached these places. Labyrinthine would love the challenges of incorporating natural beauty into their work. It was still the basis of most of the mind’s work.
The factory was growing, and that was wonderful.