Year 1 Day 3
Well if there was one thing about this situation that was manageable it was that the little demon blobs died to lasers. But I'd be damned if exponential growth wasn’t a problem, and it was certainly odd to be on this side of the equation.
I had left with my new compatriots, one rocky slime and three of the pink ones perched on my shoulder as I darted from rock pillar to rock pillar, clearing the landscape at a rapid pace. It didn’t take long for the environment to change from red rocky sand to vibrant green moss, with something suspiciously like a tree. Though at this point I was just assuming a durable trunk with leaves was just something ease enough to evolve into.
It was a jungle, and it had an infestation of the tarr like things. And based on the fact there were no slimes, and I now knew how the tarr reproduced. Osmosis after eating enough slimes. I could only assume that the things had eaten all the slimes in this area, which raised the excellent question of how there were slimes at all. Maybe the tarr were an invasive species and would drive the slimes to extinction?
As always more data was needed, but my mind had plenty of time to ponder the questions as my automated systems set about purging anything even resembling the creatures. And as I passed through my area sense let me watch as slimes left their hiding places after I cleared out the tarr. Letting me take note of a fair few new variations and grab a few of their leavings.
If the Tarr were too dumb to find hiding slimes that may have been how the slimes survived, though I imagine if that was the case the tiny little things would be far more skittish as a matter of course. Instead one variant just seemed to explode, not that the Tarr cared when it did, while the second new variant had seemingly made itself delicious. I was just going to assume it was poisonous until proven otherwise.
Really the exploding slime was the only one that I saw an easy use for, they could be used for power generation and their leavings were highly volatile with just a little processing. Just one would make an excellent missile payload. But that was generic and I could do better, something this high in energy would likely have limitless uses. But I’d likely find some uses for the sweet ones, or just give the androids another luxury good. Which reminds me, give the machines a way to eat food.
Also the damned things had done more damage to my shields than the tarr had, I had saved one and it had joined the others on my armor before I had known they went boom. It had taken me a few minutes to find the slimes after they’d been launched into the air and I’d decided to leave that one behind.
Actually there had been a third slime variant, but it was far more akin to a ‘normal’ slime. It just floated on the water filter feeding, and its leavings were just water molecules rearranged to stay in a shape unless acted on by a force greater than their own bonds. So basically any force outside of sitting in a neutrally buoyant environment. Then it just became normal water. I mean it was pure water, and that had uses. But actually transporting it? Even if it’d been easy it wouldn’t have been worth it.
Aside from the interesting task of analyzing exotic new substances I was also taking examples of the various plants. I might have a steady supply of foodstuffs now, the androids being oddly adept at farming, But Byzantine would enjoy it and I remembered eating leaves and dirt far too vividly to leave behind new options.
As I gathered the last of the plants I didn’t have a sample of I looked around at the clearing, by now all the Tarr were dead, and a few dozen slimes were hopping about either eating the abundant fruit or hunting the various chickens. But one was behaving differently, a pink variant and not one of mine was walking up to a honey variant's leavings and I watched as the thing ate it…. And then rapidly grew. It looked like a hybrid of a pink and honey variant, and as it ate a cube shaped fruit the thing left behind two different materials. Both the honey one and the pink one.
Did… did that mean the leavings carried genetic information and that the slimes used that to adapt to the slime best suited for its current environment? Or was I looking too far into that…. Still I had learned a thing. That was rarely bad and I scaled the clearings wall to continue on my way, now spotting more and more of the larger variants now that the Tarr were gone.
The forest continued, and as I took a closer look at the stones I was walking upon I saw faint engravings. They were beyond ancient though, hundreds of years would be a minimum even without any dating methods being used. Whether that meant there were still some sentients here was beyond me, but if they were they weren’t using any radio signals I was monitoring, which was all of them.
I had fully expected the minds to have gotten a communications satellite up in the few hours it’d been. So I could actually, you know, talk with them. And I could only assume something was stopping that, but as long as it wasn’t said aliens….. It was definitely said aliens.
Welp on-foot it was, it wasn’t like I had been traveling with a lowered guard regardless. And if the minds didn’t know where I was in addition to whatever signal interference this place had… I knew where they were. So I’d manage.
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Year 1 Day 2
Bulwark wasn’t even surprised that the creator had gotten himself teleported. At this point this was entirely expected, they had a premade procedure and everything. Establish global communications and triangulate his location if he wasn’t in range of anything ground based. Which technically applied, they had a general area where the minds knew the maker was, but a one hundred kilometers area is far too large a margin of error.
But the task of putting up a satellite was Byzantines and Labyrinthines, while Balistraia would be in charge of the retrieval. Bulwarks' role had always been more passive, restrained in scope. The mind was to defend, and so it set about analyzing the terrain around the portal and placing defenses in the most efficient spots. Land elevation and range of fire was calculated, every turret placement made for the optimal cost to effectiveness ratio. A wide array of weaponry was arrayed, as the mind didn’t yet know what was optimal for this land's creatures; it opted to have some of everything.
The odd life forms here didn’t seem hostile, more curious than anything and a simple air barrier was sufficient to redirect the majority of them. The teleporting ones were more of an issue but they seemed to operate by…. The mind didn’t really know but it knew that there was one solid and one transparent variant and they could swap positions. The transparent ones could walk through the air barriers, but not more stagnant defenses. Which raised questions as the air barriers were as solid as the walls, the mind was just going to assume the transparent forms were light based though.
Ground zero of the alternate dimension, temporally named slime-1, was rapidly filled with androids and drones once Bulwark had gotten the area secured and removed the majority of the wildlife. And they set to work under the minds protection to build a rudimentary spacecraft. Only a single use rocket, barely larger than a tank. But holding a satellite almost as large as it was. The start of the global communications and positioning system.
Veritable clouds of construction drones flew through the air, setting up power generation, transportation and logistics systems, vehicle and drone bays, the androids barracks, and ever more permanent fortifications.
Bulwark had never been good at managing drones, they weren’t something it had been designed in mind with. It was made to think along the lines of static defense and static offense, yet the mind made use of them regardless, and while it possessed far less skill in the task than Balistraia implementing them as turrets that could freely move allowed the mind to actually comprehend how to use them, and the flexibility and reactionary capabilities they added to its arsenal had ever been useful.
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But if Bulwark had issues with drones, it was utterly helpless at dealing with androids. They were like drones that it couldn’t control, and it had to talk to them to move them. They reacted to orders slowly as well, taking entire milliseconds before shifting patrol patterns, and they often engaged in frivolous activities similar to the courier drones behavior. Exchanges of greetings, stopping to trade banal information, engaging in physical contact, all of those actions caused the mind's crafted patrol routes to fall apart. Nothing it couldn't compensate for, but it was galling nonetheless, it was used to working with other parts of the same seamless machine, and that overreliance on perfection was a weakness it needed to negate.
But the mind would always have weaknesses, it was the nature of life and it didn’t truly bother the construct.
Focusing on such things was a productive way to pass the time though, and in the absence of any threats the only true task Bulwark had was monitoring the various sensors to ensure nothing snuck up on them. Including the odd nearly invisible variant of slime some of Balistraias drones had spotted.
Currently the mind was watching as a pair of scanners were playing some odd game with one of the cat-like slimes. They’d gotten a ball of yarn, and a quick review of the security tapes revealed the resistance android that had brought it, and they were dangling the string as the slime hopped after it.
The mind kept watch, and guided a Battler over just in case the thing ended up being hostile. A scanner could likely fight it off but a battler would make a confrontation a certainty. And Balistraia had noted that one of the scanners was friends with the battler the mind had sent for.
Balistraia had recently begun work on documenting all of the relationships between the androids and machines, largely to aid the other minds in team composition so they had a source to reference both known and predicted compatibility. On a fair few occasions Bulwark had paired androids that didn’t like each other, and the mind knew the others had done similar. This, sort of, solved that issue. Even if the androids or machines had never met the chart would allow for an educated guess on how well they’d react to each other.
Apparently strengthening interpersonal bonds dramatically increased performance and morale. Which made sense if one applied the fact that the minds and their maker couldn’t actually get any closer, and they worked together far better than anything else Bulwark had seen.
Bulwark pulled its attention from the scanners and battler, they’d now been joined by a few more slimes and androids regardless of its intervention, and watched as the rocket’s engines flared to life and the construct rapidly ascended into the atmosphere, it had taken nearly twenty minutes to build the rocket, the bottleneck the portal represented adding nearly seventeen minutes onto its build time just waiting for parts.
But it was still faster than waiting for Labyrinthine to finish the on-site fabrication centers. Especially as they lacked raw resources and would need to rely on energy to matter conversion. Which while enough that Bulwark never had to worry about ammunition as long as it had sufficient power, it wasn't Ideal for large scale construction. Matter to matter conversion oddly enough required more advanced systems than energy to matter, but that wasn’t Bulwarks field so while the mind could know more about the intricacies it didn’t bother.
Instead it waited for subjective years as the rocket finally reached a stable orbit and began scanning for the creator's suit. Immediately dozens of pings hit the satellite as it picked up on substantial radio chatter. Not just stellar radiation either, and Bulwark felt its thoughts slow as Balistraia pulled on more processing power to rapidly decrypt the communications.
There was every chance that the maker was with whatever was sending the messages, if one could send them they weren’t far from being able to distort them. Bulwark used what processing power it still had to comb over every digital system, looking for anything poking around where it shouldn’t be. Every open search and query traced to ensure it came from the drone or android it should have. The mind saw a fair few scanners hacking the systems, and ensured they were actually scanners before ignoring them.
Bulwark found nothing, but its vigilance didn’t waver. And Balistraia rapidly decoded the intercepted messages. They were automated check-ins by an orbital satellite network. One seemingly built to only allow communication between systems using the satellites identification codes. It took Balistraia only moments to hack them and steal these codes, and a message sent containing this code was sent. Traveling without any of the distortion their prior attempts had. This did mean their messages were being intercepted but this code was outside the encryption, not inside. And Balistraia being within the satellites systems saw them slowly trying to decode the messages. Which she then deleted.
That answered numerous questions though, Bulwark had been assuming the planet had some magnetic anomaly causing communication issues, but no it was artificially induced by satellites that seemed to be a few decades old. Implying that whoever built them wanted a monopoly on communications on the planet's surface, and that they likely still remained.
Bulwark followed along as Balistraia followed the messages chains down to the surface, there were dozens of different locations the messages had come from. But far less than one would imagine a fully inhabited world would possess, even earth with its anemic android and machine population had tens of thousands of messages, not a bare few hundred. Meaning there wasn’t actually that much information passing through, nor was it likely the world was very developed.
Certainly not enough to have actually built the satellites, which meant this was a colony, and that there were likely space ships. Bulwark left Balistraia to her more in depth searching, she’d likely send scouts to the various points of interest. Bulwark however needed to prepare for a potential attack from a space faring civilization, without anywhere near the infrastructure to make that viable.
The mind needed bigger guns if it needed to shoot down spacecraft, though missiles would likely work better. But missiles were far easier to counter, being slower moving on average.
The amount of weapons the mind actually had capable of surface to orbital fire was fairly minimal, barely three designs. A large missile variant designed to enter low orbit before turning around and reentering the atmosphere to hit its target from anywhere on the planet. They could stay waiting to fire for weeks just floating. A large magnetically propelled cannon that shot two meter long shells, it drained a significant chunk of power but the shells delivered an immense amount of energy on a successful hit. Then there was an upscaled laser that could point up, energy bleed into the atmosphere meant it lost a fair portion of its effectiveness before escaping the atmosphere but it still packed a punch.
Bulwark built all of them, and an array of anti air turrets and shields to defend the high value defenses. It wasn’t enough to do much to anything in orbit, but it meant the mind could do something.
It knew Balistraia was redirecting the nearly complete space ship that they had planned to use to build infrastructure in Sol’s asteroid system to Slime-1 as well. While it wasn’t built as a warship it was durable and had numerous weapons. And Bulwark added a recommendation that four more should be constructed and sent out to rapidly progress their ship building capabilities. It meant taking resources from other projects but this was a far larger concern.