Log #6

Year one day ten

Big news out of the way first, we have a problem. The biters have gotten into the teleportation network. Or they have their own that just happens to intersect with our own, kinda unclear.

So the bugs have a path into…….. Lots of places, They only have access to ever teleporters on Nauvis, but some of those lead to earth and others to the range. I’d done that so I could devote all of the portals to resource transport while people moved through teleporters and more importantly didn’t need to head to the portals to go through dimensions.

And you know for the amount of work it took to get the interdimensional portals working this is annoying as all hell, if I shut the portals the teleporters don’t work so that's an option if I can’t contain this, but then I’d be leaving the range to the bugs. Earth would be fine, enough of my minds exist there with enough infrastructure it’d only turn into a stalemate rather than obliteration, but the Range would be done for.

As for the extent of their spread, only a few portals lead outside of factory grounds and those were earth only. Every portal from Nauvis to the Range was still in the main factory, meaning only a handful of bugs survived the conflict long enough to break out of the factory. A few got sent to the glass desert and a couple into the moss forest. They used the range side teleporters to do it, so we know they are in the general area in both places and hunting teams are searching. Five bugs are on the range, three in the desert and two in the forest, more than enough for exponential growth. They are small, fast, and sensor spoofing variants. Thankfully not invisible but only light can see them.

Earth was worse, there were teleporters to the moon, teleporters to space, teleporters to satellites in orbit, including the bunker, teleporters to…. Basically everywhere. They were all in developed areas sure but not all in the most heavily populated areas. Meaning when bugs flooded out through the network the fighting was focused in the populated areas, and not many androids were near enough the less used portals to make a difference. And as good as the defense are everywhere, they weren’t enough to kill all the bugs everywhere.

Roughly three dozen escaped out of an estimated four thousand. But earth has an extensive network of satellites, and we have eyes on each and every one. Already construction of hives has been interrupted by orbital bombardment and I should have all of them gone within the hour.

The surviving bugs, while worrying, aren’t the worst part. In just four minutes the bugs crippled my most useful logistic weapon. Destroyed an absurd amount of infrastructure, and temporally killed hundreds of non-combatants. It’ll take a full day just to rebuild everything, and we need to remodel everything with this new possibility in mind. None of the teleporters had been unguarded and that mitigated this but it obviously wasn’t enough. And if this worked once the bugs will try again.

Probably the moment I turn the portals back on. Or more accurately rebuild them, as I had detonated the bombs I put in each and every portal, all of them, once I realized the bugs were using it. One second to react, not even really, and that many got through.

The bunker needs it’s hull replaced, a new atmosphere as the old one’s gone. My spaceships have a large chunk of their innards outright broken, so they’ll be stuck fixing that, my moon base is nearly in ruins, only a few facilities operational. All in all, this has been…… problematic.

But nothing I can’t deal with, and so I will.

Log #7

Year one day eleven

The teleporting bug thing is just going to be a thing now I imagine. It’s as dealt with as it can be though, if a teleporter is activating and no corresponding teleporter is, then the room is immediately turned into a killing chamber. The bugs aren’t going to stop trying just because they all die, they have the bodies to spare and it worked once so they’ll keep trying until they make it work again.

That means I need to be extra careful with placing teleporters, each one in a separate contained room. Making what would have been the end of my logistics trouble just an amazing help with my logistics troubles. I had been planning on forgoing all bot and belt transporting and just doing point to point teleportation, but if that's gonna work I’ll need a different method of teleporting. Likely a shorter range one so no bugs are within its effective range.

Which I might be able to do already……. I’ll look into that but it’s still risky. Which is why I have test factories, to see if new production or transportation methods go boom, or more boring failures.

On earth news there have been a few things I didn’t address last log, mostly because I was busy. First, the sentinels have been rolled out globally with only a batch of five thousand with one paragon per hundred, but that's just the first shipment. With something that’ll be going into law enforcement I’ve been making extra certain with testing the things. I haven’t had a blueprint mess up before, but the VI programing these things have needs to be taught before they can be put to work. Balistraia could handle on the job training if I needed to roll them out now, but this takes less processing power and has less risk of an error.

The second thing happening on earth is my own dumbassery, I’d entirely forgotten that the androids had multiple bodies. As in they keep a few spare, and swap as needed. Actually how they used to get around, just little lockers everywhere that they’d leave their bodies in while jumping to new ones. An utterly stupid way of doing things, given they need to maintain protected lockers in every combat zone, but it’s how they’d done it.

So instead of making androids with invisible bodies I can just make the bodies and have the androids use them as needed. Which is good because putting an android in an invisible body would likely slowly drive them insane, if it was permanent. Though now some androids are getting modifications to have see through body parts, letting you look at their internals.

It's an odd fashion statement, but not harmful.

I made invisible bodies for all of my androids, as well as a more powerful combat body. One without pain sensors, it still looks human but I added all the recent upgrades I’ve gotten, both from the droids and the new metals and alloys I discovered. Haven’t worked out how to make a paragon android, they aren’t as simple as sentines given they are sentient and each is very different. But if I do I plan on making each one of them a paragon.

Already they could take a few nukes without armor and be fine, get bisect no issue, backup processing units, redundant repair systems, no need to breath, eyes that aren’t squishy.

Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

If it wasn’t for the fact the androids apparently need bodies to have human sensation to prevent insanity I’d make this the default. As is, if they keep it on for more than a few weeks they will go insane, and its apparently uncomfortable. Like being in a sensory deprivation chamber, even though they should have all their senses, aside from pain. Or like the body doesn’t fit? Not a mechanical reason behind it and the androids basically have human brain levels of complication in their programming so I haven’t pinpointed the issue. Much less if the issue can be solved, but it does answer the question of why the androids feel pain. Sort of.

I let them all pick what their new bodies looked like, and most of them stuck with their original appearance with just a few modifications. Which makes sense, I can do a full body reconstruction whenever and still keep my own looks.

Both the scanners look a bit taller and just a hair older, both still svelte tennagers in appearance though. Given both complained about being treated like children (they all are) I had imagined they’d go for big muscles and larger frames, but no. apparently it throws off 9S’s balance and 16S’s had no excuses, I believe the latter more than the former.

A2 now has muscle definition for days, it doesn't affect her strength though. That and tattoos and scarring, not even of anything in particular. Though the scars are from injuries she had before I fixed em. Apparently she wants them as a reminder, though she didn’t tell me of what and I had the oddest feeling I’d be stabbed if I asked more so I left. Those feelings are rarely wrong.

2B doesn’t look like she changed anything, to someone of lesser senses. Also I had her original specifications and the new ones, so I cheated a bit but would have noticed regardless. Her bust is just slightly larger, not even by a half a millimeter, like she just messed with the simulation to see what it’d look like and didn’t set it back to the original value correctly. Which is what happened, and since I find this amusing I will wait till her next pseudo therapy session to tell her.

The battler squad all just made themselves a bit bigger in every way, still proportionally the same. I’d mentioned I could fit more into a larger body so they added another three inches each, independently of each other. Not much of an increase in attributes but three percent increase is a three percent increase. Also longer limbs means you hit harder and move quicker regardless.

32D kind of pulled the same thing as A2 but with a bodybuilder route, built like a brick wall now, and about a foot taller. She asked me to not just do broad improvements either, all that extra space is armor and shielding. Which was only kind of what I thought would happen. At this point her and her armor are more than durable enough to shrug off basically any attack for a fair bit of time.

I’m rolling this out on a broader scale as well, some machines are getting more human bodies, basically just being shiny androids. Other androids are just making minor modifications to their own appearance, and as previously mentioned, some are going full exotic. The invisible body parts thing, some have extra limbs or a tail, animalistic ears, odd skin colors, basically anything they think of and are impulsive enough to try. It’s limited to once a week, and they need to bring in their own raw materials, but most are already preparing for a second use. Either because they didn’t like their changes or because they just want to try more.

I did need to put a ban on them looking like me, but that just lead to an idea for myself.

There are now pseudo-engineers running around. Android versions of myself, with memory scans. Still linked into the greater factory, and with how like me they already are they are fully under my subconscious control. Mostly, I had called them lesser-engineers and they’d gotten offended and suggested pseudo-engineer. But on the large scale they are just me, and get remerged at the end of every day. Which solves my long standing issue of there only being one of me, even if these me’s are worse in every way.

They don’t have my innate understanding of machines, though they can piggyback on mine, they have no inventory, or internal fabrication, or radar, or any of the hundreds of things I came with. But they can design and talk to others just fine. Only having three right now, but eventually I will be infinite, or legion. And the Balistraia has told me the androids are worried about how all of me are manically cackling on occasion.

Apparently when it was just the one me doing it it was less unnerving. Or because these are androids? They still get the innate reverence though…..

Questions for days.

Finally got that ezzo sample I needed as well, which means I already started figuring out how to make more of it. And adding the FTL engines to my spaceships. Which still need an ezzo core, which doesn’t actually get used up apparently. The designs I had stolen used it, very slowly yeah but it was preventable with just a bit of effort on my part. And the design was awful anyway, I have drastically reduced how much ezzo I need and increased my maximum mass reduction.

Dozens of self propagating space stations have been set up as well, each with a labyrinthine and byzantine. Eventually Sol's asteroid belt will be eaten, and by eventually I mean in two months. Exponential growth is fun, and kinda cheating but the bugs do it too so it doesn’t matter.

Moon base had only been delayed by a day, and only minor redesigns needed to be done.

On the range front, nothing much has changed. A few new slimes with novel plorts but until I start using them for something I’ll leave that be. A few of my androids have made contact with humans, against orders. But they kept cover and it turned out fine so I didn’t overly reprimand them. I left that to Anemone, who banned them from leaving earth for six years.

Thats going to rapidly become a larger issue though, more androids are going to both Nauvis and the Range, and on the latter there’s a rather high chance of accidentally finding a human. They just walk about the planet, aimlessly. I already spoke to the androids about it, and the majority of them understand my viewpoint on it, or my publically palatable one. But there are always outliers and Balistraia can’t catch all of them.

So the plan is to get off of the range, set up a fake colony. Declare independence, ‘discover’ android tech, ‘make androids’ and then profit. Or something else, as Balistraria categorically hates that idea. And shes the people person…. People intelligence, people handler.