03 - Creepy Flying Hoarder
The rogue AI ant skittered back, leaking black goo as it moved. Smooth bulkheads surrounded it, offering no purchase or escape. It had suffered too much damage, its limbs bent and one sheared off, the armor along its thorax was punctured and ruined, and it was sluggish to respond to the incoming threats.
Another ant appeared, then another; they were battered, unlike the cornered ant, they were not on their last legs. They moved efficiently and fell upon the ant, their bladed legs slashing and stabbing. Within moments, the cornered ant collapsed to the deck and shuddered, finally succumbing to its wounds.
“Well, hell,” Maya muttered as she looked down at the dead ant.
“I win,” Tender replied. “Pay up.”
“Y’know when I said I bet I could beat you, it was totally rhetorical, right?”
“No. Pay up.”
Maya sighed and summoned a credit coin. She tossed it at Tender, who snatched it out of the air.
“I’ll be beggared at this rate. I was outnumbered, two against one. The odds were not in my favor.”
“It’s only one credit, boss. Plus you insisted.”
“Only one credit? That could have been the credit that would have saved mankind!”
“Then you should not have bet it,” Tender said.
Maya laughed and looked down at the corpse of the ant inside the small fighting arena she had created. It had been a standard day since they returned from the hiveship, most of it spent going over the ants they had captured. Three dozen ants filled Tender’s dimensional bags and her own Inventory. It had seemed excessive, but Maya had plans.
That plan was testing the extent of Tender’s control of the ants. This wasn’t like the defense drones, those had a different set of programming. The ant drones would have to be watched almost constantly, their work checked and ensured that they were doing things correctly. After digging through the ants programing, they had come to the conclusion that the ants were stupid. There was more processing power in a blender than there was in the ants themselves.
Without the guiding hiveship AI core, they were clumsy children bumbling into everything if they weren’t watched. Maya wondered how they managed to add their processing power to the hiveship mind when they weren’t all that bright to begin with.
“Well, that was interesting,” Maya said. “Let me try something.”
Maya focused on the ant and shifted the Cage material around it. The Tier 2 components moved like water and swallowed up the ant. Maya’s eyes were locked on the tablet before her, she scrolled through the information and sighed.
“I don’t know what’s happening to the stuff the Cage ‘consumes’,” she said. “The Cage snuffed out a lot of ants in the last fight, but I don’t know what happened to them. Are they being added to the Cage’s mass, are they being destroyed completely, or are they being stored somewhere.” Maya shook her head as she inventoried the tablet.
“Is it my turn?” Roci asked.
Maya looked to the AI, she was practically bouncing up and down on her tentacles, looking at the fighting pit.
“What now?” Maya asked.
“The fight. Is it my turn to control an ant and fight Tender?”
“There are no turns, kid. We were just testing the drones,” Maya said.
“Liar. You could have just run a diagnostic test. I want to fight Tender.”
“He’s right here. Go for it,” Maya said.
“No. I mean with the ants.”
“Dear Roci, you know those ants aren’t toys. They’re the drones that will ensure our survival and expansion. Every ant is special and necessary for our future growth.” Maya said, setting a hand on Roci’s shoulder.
“Ugh, you’re the worst. You just don’t want me to have fun.”
“Gaining knowledge and helping people is the best kind of fun. Why don’t you see what the Astronauts are doing?” Maya smiled.
Roci glared. “They’re boring. They’re just happy and excited about digging through all that crap you brought back from the hiveship. It’s like they’ve never seen Tier 2 materials, high-grade rogue tech, or even dimensional storage containers.”
“I don’t think you’ve ever seen Tier 2 materials, either,” Maya said.
“They’re just raw resources, we can’t even process it. We don’t have the Abilities or Skills,” Roci said.
“Come on, let’s go bug them and see what we can get out of them,” Maya guided the AI from the fighting pit.
“But I want to beat up Tender,” Roci said.
‘We all do, honey, but right now he has to work on the other ants.”
Roci growled and pulled out of Maya’s grip. She flounced off.
“Kids these days,” Maya said loudly.
“You’re the worst!” Roci cried.
Maya chuckled and headed toward the far end of the Cage. She had changed the layout, turning it into a large open warehouse. Along one wall were a dozen small rooms that were Yosi, Bell, the Astronauts, and her own sleeping quarters. It was bare and spartan, but it was better than bunks on the ISS.
Yosi and Veskari were leading the inventorying of the items gained from the hiveship. Maya had been surprised that the hiveship had used mostly dimensional storage containers to hold their cargo. It seemed excessively expensive, but she was sure the hiveship had their reason. Tender claimed it was to reduce weight, which was possible. The entire ship was a mountain of rogue tech and machinery, she supposed they had to make it as lean as possible.
The Astronauts had abandoned their building and playing with the engineering VR to help Yosi out. It had been more curiosity and then shock as they realized what they were looking at. Soon, all six Astronauts were involved in the organizing of the loot they had taken off of the hiveship.
“What do we got, people?” Maya asked as she neared the working group.
Yosi looked up from a tablet and scurried over to Maya. She had a grin on her face as she thrust the tablet at Maya.
“What am I looking at?” Maya asked.
“Read it.”
“Looks like numbers and stuff,” Maya said, crossing her eyes. “Give me the cliff notes.”
Yosi sighed and took the tablet. “The short of it is that the hiveship picked up everything and stored it, anything of value even if they could not use it.”
“Oh, the hiveship was a packrat, a creepy flying hoarder holding onto trash?”
“We’ve come across everything from crafting materials, to machined parts, to system tech components, to metric tons of rogue AI parts and material. It’ll be days more before we can figure out what all these dimensional containers hold, but it is looking like we are not going to be running out of resources soon.”
Maya grinned. “Prioritize anything that can be sold to Pegarios or back on Earth. The low and mid grade stuff, set them aside for Earth. High-grade for Peg.”
Yosi nodded. “George and Yuri have a plan they want to discuss with you.”
“What is it?”
“Something about helping mankind,” Yosi replied.
***
Maya sat down on the chair and looked at the two Astronauts, well one astronaut and a cosmonaut. George carried a system tech tablet and set it down before him.
“What’s up, guys?” Maya asked. She summoned a ration bar and chewed on it. She made a face at the taste of it.
“Yuri and I have some experience in disaster relief,” George said. “We are both military and we both have worked with other organizations to help in disasters across the world.”
The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.
“Okay…”
“We understand you have been fighting against robotic creatures in that other dimensional plane and everything here has been gained by your struggles,” George said diplomatically.
“You have much and humans are dying daily,” Yuri said. “Yet you are barely helping them. This must change.”
“Pardon?” Maya inventoried her ration bar.
“We understand that you have a lot of work on your hands, therefore Yuri and I are volunteering to begin forming a plan on how to best help mankind,” George said. “We have an abundance of supplies at our disposal and you now have access to more of that liquid mana to keep the Cage activated.”
“We have experience in disasters,” Yuri said. “We know what is needed and we can figure out the logistics and areas that need our help.”
“Yosi informed us that you had plans on creating something similar, sending food, weapons, and shelter back to Earth to help people. We understand a lot has happened, but we’re willing to continue that program while you focus on other things.”
Maya drummed her fingers on the table and sighed. She had nearly forgotten about her plan to help mankind. So much had occurred in the last few weeks that her head was scrambled from it all. Plans had a way of falling to the wayside as an emergency rose up and she had to deal with it.
It seemed forever ago that Tender and she had been trying to make a sword from the marsani hull of the Hangy. Now she was probably swimming in low grade weapons from the hiveship. They had a small lake of liquid mana within the hiveship and the smaller annoying presence of rogue AIs was diminished for now. With the mana purge going on, only the big boys would be an issue.
“Go for it,” Maya said. “Plan it out, figure it out, tell me the deets when you’re done, and we’ll see what we can do.”
“We already have,” George said, sliding her the tablet.
Maya picked it up and looked at it. “Really?” she asked. She began scrolling the tablet and then stopped.
Yuri had leaned back in his chair as she began reading, from his pocket he pulled out something. A moment later he was chewing on it.
“What’s that?” Maya asked.
“Chocolate bar,” Yuri said.
“What!”
***
“They’ve been holding out on me!” Maya said to Tender as she opened a doorway. The hiveship interior opened up before them and she stepped to the side of the door as a troop of half a dozen ants walked through. Tender followed them into the hiveship. “All this time they’ve been holding out on me.’
“It is only a foodstuff,” Tender said. “You are currently in possession of nearly five hundred kilograms of foodstuffs.”
“It’s not the same, Tender. It’s chocolate, it’s fruits, it’s everything that I haven’t had in months! They’ve got steak, they’ve got chicken, they’ve even got some Spam!”
“It is common practice to supply long mission with foodstuffs, is it not?”
“Yeah…”
“Then why are you surprised they have food from your planet on their station?”
“Because. They never told me!”
“Did you ask?”
Maya frowned, looking at Tender.
“I will take that as a no,” Tender said.
“The point, Tender,” Maya said, “is that they’ve had all these supplies and here all I’ve been eating are god damn ration bars that taste like sawdust mixed with grease. I have been yearning for the sweet taste of chocolate, of coffee, of sugar, and the tender moistness of cake and fritters.” Maya sighed, leaning against the bulkhead of the hiveship. An ant skittered by.
“Well, they did offer you their supplies,” Tender said.
“After I told them I could use the food processor we grabbed from the Hangy and Nan’s medical knowledge to replicate the food,” Maya said. “Before that they were cagey about the whole business. After I let them into my home, play with my VR gear, poop in my bathroom.”
“If you wish, I can toss them out of the Cage,” Tender said.
“Nah, too much trouble. They’re national heroes, bud. Think of the PR nightmare. No one will want to buy Sullivan goods anymore, we’ll be boycotted, shamed on social media!”
“I suppose,” Tender said.
“Plus they’ve got a pretty cool plan on helping their fellow man.”
“I have read their proposal, it is ambitious.”
“I think they just want to play with system tech,” Maya said. “There are simpler ways to doing this, right?”
“Possibly,” Tender said. “Although they are correct in that they are limited in what they can do while in the Cage. You also wanted them to become more familiar with system tech.”
“They want to set up an entire satellite communications network,” Maya said. “I get it, but man, that’s thinking big.”
“It will help in the logistics aspect of their plan,” Tender said. The ants began moving down the corridor before them, heading toward the liquid mana containment tanks.
“Not only that, but food and weapons manufacturing. Something about a Liberator gun? Dropping supplies into cities, sending in armed ants to defend settlements, they’re thinking big.” Maya kicked a piece of debris, sending it clattering down the corridor. “I was just thinking of selling things to people and maybe buying up more settlement deeds to help peeps. It’s not fair, I’ve been fighting and building for the last four months and I’m not even at level 10 in Engineering. Yuri and George are already at level 7! They’re channeling mana and they’re leveling like crazy. I can’t keep up with them, soon they’ll all be far ahead of me.”
“You’re still Level 100,” Tender said as they entered the storage room. The room was lit with the ambient glow of the liquid mana. The six ants under Tender’s control began dismantling the connections keeping it in place. “They’re leveling occupational abilities, but they’re still not even Level 10.”
It was quick work for the ants, as they detached the liquid mana container. Maya peered at the device, it was a rogue tech machine and from what she could tell it was far better than the one she had built. It just went to show her, even the rogue AIs were better at building than she was.
She sighed as she followed them back to the Cage.
“I need to figure out how to do this whole essence mana thing. I suppose we can go back to Bell’s grandma and try to see if she knows anything about it. She’s Tier 3 so she’s gotta have been studying up on how to use it,” Maya followed Tender and the ants back into the Cage.
Pain spiked in her head and she could feel the Cage convulse. It shook her and she wasn’t the only one to notice, shouts of alarm sounded from the Astronauts and the others. Maya felt dizzy for a moment and then the Cage moved on its own. One moment the deck was simply the deck, the next moment it surged upward, turning liquid and then wrapping up the ants and the liquid mana container.
A blast of cold seem to fill Maya as the ants and container disappeared. She felt weak, but also… energized.
“What the hell?” Maya asked.
***
“There appears to be nothing medically wrong with you,” Nan said, looking her over.
“Cool, but that’s not the reason I’m here. Is the chocolate ready yet?”
“You nearly collapsed and the Cage acted without your guidance, this after you suffered major brain damage. I would think you would be more concerned about your health,” Nan said.
“Oh, I am, but y’know… chocolate.”
“It is not done.”
“Should I come back in an hour? Ten minutes?”
“I will admit that the Cage acting on it’s own is mildly concerning. Along with the fact that it’s having an effect upon you.”
“Well, I’m linked to the Cage now, so I guess what happens to it, happens to me?” Maya said. She sat on the edge of Nan’s medical bed and glanced at Roci and Bell who stood in the corner watching.
“The Cage is acting weird now?” Roci asked. “Like it has a mind of its own?”
“No, I don’t think there’s a mind forming here,” Maya said, getting up. “I think it’s the union tech that’s changing things, it wants that liquid mana.”
“For what?” Bell asked. As with system tech, he now looked at the new union tech in the same manner. It was something he had never heard of and anything new was suspicious.
Maya shrugged. “I think it needs it. It consumed the entire five thousand liter container. Whoosh, gone. Not even a drop went to powering the Cage itself.” Five thousand liters would have made two thousand five hundred tesseracts, which could have been charged with five hundred billion gens. All gone now. “But I can ‘feel’ that the union tech has ‘grown’, as in there’s more of it now. It’s all swirling up there, mixing with the rogue tech and the system tech and the tesseracts the Cage consumed.”
“What does union tech do?” Bell asked.
Maya shrugged. “I don’t know. I got the knowledge cubes, just haven’t used them yet.”
“Why not?” Roci demanded.
“Because, I’m on the tail end of the engineering knowledge cubes I began months ago. I’m almost done. What if I need this engineering knowledge to figure out what the heck is going on with the Cage?” Maya said.
Roci and Bell exchanged a look. “How long do you have left until the cubes are done downloading?”
“About three weeks,” Maya said.
“In that case, we can’t bring more liquid mana onto the Cage,” Roci said. “We are going to have to move it from the hiveship to the Hangy.”
“It’s probably best to leave it on the hiveship,” Bell said. “The Hanganathorie lacks any kind of defenses.”
“Yeah, but the Hangy also has all the equipment and machinery to make the black goo and mana netting,” Roci said. “Tender’s now the master of the ants, he can control up to a dozen without any problems. If I can get back to the RSH, I can probably match him. It’ll be easy peasy.”
“You’re not going back to the RSH,” Maya said.
“You need more hands to do all this work.”
“Scotty’s been taken off the bench,” Maya said.
“Scotty’s system tech, he won’t make it,”
“It doesn’t matter, as long as it’s a tesseract powering him, he’ll be okay. It’s when they’re mobile and on their own that they need black goo,” Maya said. “That’s why Veskari, Nan, and you can’t go back just yet. Unless you all wanna become rogue AIs?”
Roci snorted. “Rogue AIs are stupid.”
“Really?” Tender asked.
Roci let out a squeak, turning to see the rogue AI standing in the doorway.
“No offense,” Roci muttered.
“I am deeply offended, Roci. I thought you held me in some regard,” Tender said.
“I-I…” Roci stammered.
“What’s up, Tender?” Maya asked, letting Roci simmer in her own mess.
“Besides being devastated verbally by Roci, I have brought Scotty back and we are ready to test if he can function within the Hangy.”
“Cool, I’ll slum it with you,” Maya said.
“Are you sure you wish to associate with someone as stupid as I?” Tender asked as they walked away.
“Nah, it’s cool. If I can hang with Bell, I can def hang with you.”
“Hey!” Bell shouted.
***
“You alive in there, little buddy?” Maya asked, tapping the AI core.
“I am,” a voice said from a speaker.
‘You’re what now?”
“I am.”
“This a Biblical reference?” Maya asked.
“What’s a Biblical.”
“Oof, tough question. Well, y’see-“
“Scotty appears to be functioning within acceptable parameters,” Tender said, interrupting them. The darkened manufacturing center of the Hangy was lit by a pair of mana lights. They had brought in two tesseracts and hooked them up to the machinery.
Maya looked at the handiwork and wasn’t pleased with it. They had spent so much time trying to get the cores hooked up, setting up their manufacturing and disassembly rooms before the mana purge hit. Now it felt like they were trying to run their machines off of generators while the power was out. It was expensive and inefficient.
The more power they gained, the more power they needed to use. If there wasn’t a mana purge, if the Cage wasn’t tied to the RSH, if, if, if…
Forty million gens an hour. The Cage was burning through their stockpile. In the old days, that much mana could have kept the Cage active for twenty hours.
That meant they would have to make more tesseracts, they would have to make more black goo, and they definitely would need to begin work on the black goo network to bring in as much mana as possible.
Maya patted Scotty’s core. “Welp, we’re gonna work you to the bone, buddy. Hope you’re looking forward to some long days of making black goo netting.”
“I am aquiver with anticipation,” Scotty replied.
“Don’t ever say ‘aquiver’ again. Sounds gross,” Maya said.
“Shall we proceed with powering the other machinery?” Tender asked.