Chapter 3. Get it off Me.
“What’s that!” Watkins said as shifted his view toward the damaged section of his core. There, gnawing at scratching at the core was a nasty creature he had never seen before. It looked like an oversized rat had somehow combined with a bug. It stood on all fours and had a hard, chitinous outer shell that was broken up by patches of mangy fur.
He was distracted from the nasty-looking creature by the realization that he had just spoken. Watkins’ voice sounded like his own, but had a robotic tone to it, like someone had run it though a poorly programmed audio filter and pumped it through a cheap speaker. Fresh spikes of pain brought his attention back to the creature. He was shocked to see that its little claws and sharp teeth of the rat thing were somehow managing to shave small bits of metal from his core housing.
Mutated Bilge Rat, Threat Level 0.
Bilge rats are common on most spacefaring vessels and must be regularly eradicated to prevent damage to delicate systems, and contamination of foodstuffs. These vermin are attracted to power conduits and seek out reactors and other power sources to feed upon. This example has been mutated by an unknown method and has taken on aspects of another common shipboard pest, the Yendax Beetle.
“Who keeps popping those words into my head?” Watkins asked.
System messages are integrated into your core. They exist to guide you and inform you of the various aspects of your new existence.
“Okay, so how do I stop that rat-bug thing? It’s really starting to hurt,” Watkins asked.
Examining existing connections.
No Mobile Offensive Battle Units (MOBS) are connected to this network.
No repair drone support units are connected to the network.
A link to the universal fabricator has been detected.
Suggested course of action, utilize the fabricator to create a repair drone.
“How do I do that?” Watkins asked. If this repair drone could fix the damage the rat-bug was doing, he was more than happy to build one.
To access the universal fabricator, seek out the production menu.
As soon as Watkins thought about asking what a production menu was, he felt it. It was like a thin tendril of his will connected to the fabricator device. As he examined the connection, some options appeared in front of him.
Universal Fabricator Production Menu.
1. Simple repair drone. Level 0. This drone will perform repairs and maintenance on your vessel automatically or can be directed by the core to a specific task or priority. Fabrication of this drone requires 5 units of salvage.
Current salvage reserves: 7.
Watkins had barely enough to make a drone. He ordered a drone to be construction and waited for something to happen. The current salvage reserve total began to tick down, but when Watkins tried to watch the drone being constructed, he found his vision was blocked. He could sense the fabricator was nearby, and that he maintained a connection to it, but his field of vision was limited to his core and the immediate area around it.
Somehow, he knew that he should have vision over the entire ship, but there was something blocking him from doing so. Wait, that was where he was, wasn’t it? He was on a ship. No, he wasn’t on a ship, he was the ship. That was the purpose of his core, to control and power the ship around him.
Despite his revelation, Watkins found that he could do little with the knowledge. Something was wrong with the vessel he was on, and as much as he tried, Watkins couldn’t detect the rocking of the sea around them. Hopefully, the damage to his vessel wasn’t so bad that he’d start to take on water.
No, that wasn’t right either, he wasn’t at sea like he had been as human sailor, he was in space. It was bizarre to have these little bits of knowledge suddenly unlocked inside his mind, but it was also frustrating as each bit of data that he possessed about his new life, meant one more bit of himself had been replaced to put it there. At least the strange system that seemed to govern his new life had mentioned that he could unlock his old memories again, but they were being stored somewhere else.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
Thoughts of his old life stopped when a fresh wave of pain lanced into his body.
Core housing durability is at 98%.
The nasty rat-bug wasn’t stopping and didn’t seem to get tired of tearing into Watkins. He needed that drone in here, pronto, if he wanted to get himself repaired. A quick check showed that his salvage reserves were down to 3, and his drone was 80% complete. Another minute passed and he received notification that the drone was on the job.
You have constructed a simple repair drone. Acceptable command limit levels detected. Available salvage is at 1. Production of this unit was completed below maximum efficiency and required additional salvage.
Watkins immediately ordered his drone to begin repairs on his core. A moment later, a small, square section on the bottom of the far wall retracted, and the drone walked into the compartment. His drone was about the size of a small dog, slightly larger than the creepy rat that was attacking him.
The drone had a rectangular metal and plastic body with six spider-like legs attached. Two arms made from thin, hinged metal rods were attached along the back of the drone, each arm ending in a three-fingered hand capable of using the various tools that were housed inside the drone’s body. It made whirring noises, and the metallic legs occasionally clacked against the floor as it moved.
As the drone moved in to effect repairs, the rat noticed it. With a hiss, the rat tried to warn off the drone. It didn’t want to share its prize with anyone, or anything, else. The drone halted its approach, and a communication line opened between Watkins and the drone.
Hostile lifeform has been detected. As the sole surviving drone on this vessel, additional permissions are needed due to the potential risk of this situation. Conflict is likely if this unit attempts repairs. Please inform this unit of the optimal course of action.
“Kill that rat!” Watkins shouted; his odd sounding voice carried a hint of desperation that seemed to overcome the drone’s hesitancy.
Please be advised that this unit is suboptimal for combat duties. It is recommended that any further combat be completed with an appropriate Mobile Offensive Battle Unit, not a unit designated for maintenance and repair.
“Sorry repair drone, you’re all I have to fight with,” Watkins said to his minion.
Authorization received, engaging hostile entity.
With that, the drone began to clatter its way forward. The drone’s two arms hesitated for a moment before selecting the tools it would use as makeshift weapons. One arm held what looked like a slightly bent screwdriver and the other held a metal mallet that looked far too heavy for its thin, metal arms to manage.
Seeing the threat, the rat-bug slashed Watkins’ core housing one last time before spitting out an even louder hiss and launching itself at the drone. The drone responded without fear, stabbing the screwdriver deep into the side of the rat-bug’s body. The strike made the rat squeal even louder and latch its jaws onto the arm holding the screwdriver.
The drone hadn’t been lying when it said it wasn’t built for combat. Teeth that had barely shaved a sliver of metal off Watkins’ core housing crunched completely through the drone’s metal arm, which was apparently hollow and not as robust as Watkins had hoped. Incapable of feeling pain, the drone kept up the assault, using the hammer in its other hand to smash into the rat’s skull.
With a sickening crunch, the hammer cracked through the skull of the bug-rat. Lumpy, grey mush stuck to the hammer as the drone repeated the strike two more times. Finally, after the last blow, new words appeared in front of Watkins.
Mutated Bilge Rat, threat level 0, has been eliminated. Do you wish to salvage the remains? Y/N.
Watkins was about to ask how he would salvage the remains when he remembered that he was connected to something called a Reprocessor. Its function seemed to be turning debris, or it appeared, even the corpses of living creatures, into salvage for his vessel to use. Ordering the drone to salvage the remains, Watkins watched as it first began to repair its severed arm. It took a few minutes of work using a welding tool built into one of its legs before the drone was whole again.
Once it had repaired itself, the drone shoved the bleeding corpse of the rat creature into a storage compartment on the drone’s back and returned through the retractable portion of the wall it had entered from. As it left Watkins’ compartment, he lost sight of it. The damage to his core housing ached a bit, but it was more of a minor irritation now that the rat thing wasn’t actively chewing on him.
With the excitement over the attack dying down, Watkins found himself returning to the internal struggle he had faced earlier. His two sides warred, one wanting Watkins to sink into cold logic, and the other battling to keep ahold of his humanity. As he fought with himself, Watkins thought about the battle with the mutated rat. It had been a potentially deadly situation for him.
If the drone had lost the fight, he would have been slowly consumed by the rat, enduring excruciating pain as the damage to his core mounted. This new life was a dangerous one, and his position was precarious. Maybe it was time for him to embrace both sides of his existence. He needed the cold, logical portion of his mind, the one that seemed more in tune with operating his core.
He also needed his humanity, which he somehow knew would be crucial for the future. A truce of sorts was formed, each part of his being taking on the tasks it was best suited for. The cold logical portion of his mind also brought up the fact that as Watkins repaired and upgraded himself, he would regain more of his humanity.
When fully functional, Watkins would lose nothing of his humanity, and would instead have gained a calculating, logical mind that his ship could put to good use. With the conflict inside himself over, or at least postponed for a time, he got to work. Watkins had a ship to repair, and to do that, he was going to need more salvage.