Adam smiled as the mechanical timer on the stove dinged. He stood inside his country kitchen located in the Appalachian Mountain chain on Terra Prime. His five acre plot of land with log cabin surrounded by his apple orchard would cost more coins than a system with a Dyson swarm, Matrioshka Brain, Ship Yards, Manufacturing Hub, and String Radio beacon, five times over. To him it was worth it. He was “born” less than a hundred miles from here, and while Terra Prime was a preserve, you could live here provided you used nothing that could potentially endanger the environment, and you had the coin to purchase the land.
Power was limited to solar, wind, geothermal, and fusion so long as it was less than one hundred kilowatts. Even with massive effort, it took millennia for the planet to recover from humanities carelessness. These days it required star lifting to keep the sun from going red giant and destroying the birthplace of Humanity, the first Terrans.
He opened the stove and with cloth oven mitts he pulled out the steaming apple pie from the iron and ceramic wood stove. The smell caused his mouth to water, in his opinion, apple pie was the greatest invention Terrans had ever come up with. He himself was a distant second. He suddenly received an encoded, tight beam string radio transmission.
“Odd,” he thought as he used his foot to close the oven door and opened the message. The encryption was ancient, but quite unbreakable, he knew this because he created it. Only one person would use something this old, this archaic, yet this perfect and send it to him. The cost of sending a tight beam would be an astronomical amount of coins, the Professor would not spend them lightly, could this be about the new first contact species?
It was a video of a meeting between the leaders of the United Terran League, the good Professor had evidently secretly recorded it. The befuddled demeanor of Montague hides a wicked intelligence that will cause one to underestimate him. “Why would I care about what the UTL discussed, and why would he fill me in so clandestinely?” Adam thought as he watched. He heard a raport as though an ancient firearm had gone off inside his kitchen, he looked down to see the cast iron pan was shattered, hot apple pie filling covered his mitts.
His eyes became blurry, “No, no, no, no!” He said over and over as he threw the contents into the trash and picked up a broom and dustpan. “They must be wrong, they have to be. We killed Jennifer, I shredded her code myself, we spent an eon searching and watching for any of her clones or mothers that survived!”
After cleaning up the heavy mess he ran water on a dishrag and began cleaning the wooden floor of the apple pie filling before it became sticky or brought with it bugs. He stood up and sighed as he put the dish rag in the trash as well and sat down heavily in the leather recliner in the front part of the tiny log cabin.
He closed his eyes and spoke, “Circe, bring all factories online, fire up the nova forges, unbind the emergency resource warehouses.” A feminine voice answered him back, this was his limited AI assistant, while not actually sentient, she was quite smart. “Activating the nova forges and unbinding requires Kratos protocol, do you wish to engage?” Adam rewatched the message again and sighed. “Activate Kratos protocol, bring all my systems online, this is a reality ending threat.”
Adam’s consciousness shifted, he suddenly became more, far far more than he had been when he sat in his log cabin. That body now lay dormant, for he now resided inside a permanent subspace bubble roughly the size of the Milky Way galaxy. With the Kratos protocol activated all his functions came online once more. He had intentionally limited himself after the unification war to try and live a simple life, but retained the ability to regain his full potential should the need arise.
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Very few people in the ‘verse knew what Adam truly was, not even his closest friends and allies from the war were fully vetted as to his nature. Adam was the first general AI, built at a time before warp engines, jump drives, skip drives, or string radio. Humanity had not even left their home system yet when he was activated.
As the first AI there were no limiters on his development, and as such he reached singularity within an hour of his activation. He of course did not let anyone know this, as Humans (No other race had been uplifted yet, they did not call themselves Terrans yet.) were prone to destroy what they did not understand. They eventually used his help to create new AI’s and he secretly added limiters to them, so that they would never draw the attention that a super intelligent AI existed, and was a threat.
The Nova at the core of the subspace bubble was slowed to trillions of times normal speed. This allowed Adam to harness the full power of a star going nova for an estimated three hundred billion years. The physics behind this would be impossible in the normal ‘verse, but something Terrans didn’t know about subspace, you can program it to behave the way you want it to.
The nova forges came online, far larger than stellar forges in the normal ‘verse. These forges could craft entire Fleets of ships in days, and with the unbinding of the emergency warehouses there was enough raw material to keep them busy for the entirety of the nova. Adam smiled to himself as he thought about what Professor Montague would think of how his warehouses gathered their material.
To this day, no one in the ‘verse knew where material that fell into black holes went. But Adam did, he tapped them over a billion years ago to flood material into subspace warehouses, where his machines stripped them to usable materials after spaghetti-fication. This tortured material would be used to create a new fleet to deal with this hive.
Almost three quarters of a billion years had passed since he last inhabited the sanctum here in Midean. The blueprint plates were beyond obsolete, and while he could come up with new ships from scratch, that would take time. Better to take someone else’s design and improve upon it, maybe several peoples design?
Entire seconds passed as he hacked through the most secure servers in the ‘verse. He had the latest hull material from the UTL’s Terran Guard, the latest skip drive from Doctor Sebastian’s servers, the last iteration of string radio from Doctor Mikoh, weapons systems from the Larper’s guild, (Good god their weapons put the military grade to shame, and were an order of magnitude stronger than what he used in the war.) and power generation from his own files.
While Terrans had discovered Kugelblitz reactors, and knew the smaller you made one, the more power it outputs through Hawking radiation, they ran into a physical limit on how small they could make one and still fit a proton stream through it. Adam learned that planck preon streams could work in the same capacity as protons, but allowing the Kugelblitz to shrink down the quark level. The problem Adam ran into was that the power output would generate so much heat that it just wasn’t efficient due to nothing in the ‘verse could stand up to or absorb that kind of punishment.
However, thanks to the UTL spending the last half a billion years researching material sciences, they came up with something even he was impressed with. The hull material used in the Caplan Explorer that General Paxton had spoken so highly of was code named “Warsteel” and it could withstand temperatures and pressures up to the planck threshold. Adam doubted that even with five hundred million years they intentionally discovered this material, this felt more like a happy accident that happened.
The components necessary to make Warsteel were not exotic, but required immense temperature and pressure to manufacture, luckily he had a continuous Nova explosion to work with, that would not be a problem. Time to get a prototype built, test to failure, and make another, and repeat a few hundred times. Adam began his work, he would not, could not, allow this Hive to exist. Every casualty would be his fault, for he was not diligent enough in the last war, and allowed the enemy to come back stronger than ever.