System log: The Bunker, Site 3

Solar Calendar: Unknown, 2???

Current status: Active

Log 14

Outside, Gamma watched through the security cameras as Dina put her new P.M.S (personal mecha suit) Knight through physical tests under the watchful eye of the captain Donaldson and the other Roadrunners while keeping out of the way of the still working construction drones. They were just on the edge of range for the facility’s microphones to pick up the human’s conversation thankfully, though the human boss’ loud voice made that less of an issue.

“1 mile dash, go!” the human captain ordered. On his signal, Dina began sprinting the 1609 meters marked by two rocks on either end. This was the third time she was running this stretch, with the first being a test and the second having Dina slow down and stop. This time, she was aiming for the fastest time and would not be stopping. At the end of the mile, Sloan stood waiting with his terminal in hand. When Dina passed him, he jogged back to rejoin the others.

“So?” their boss asked.

“I have Dina’s records on hand, from her terminal,” Sloan reported as he clicked through his menus. “Her top speed on record without her exo-suit was 20 miles per hour, with an average of 14 mph for marathon running. With her exo-suit’s help at max efficiency, she managed a 30 mph top speed with an average of 20 to 22 mph. Naturally, the last two don’t include pushing the suit to its max potential to limit damage.”

“So, a little higher than average,” Donaldson nodded. “That equates to Roadrunner standards. Even Ryan as one of the slowest in our group is only slightly slower, I believe.”

“Boss, you know I’m better suited for heavier loads right?” Ryan protested. “I can carry twice what she or Sloan can.”

“True,” the boss nodded in agreement. “It’s the marathon speeds that are more important for our job anyway.” He nodded for the younger man to continue.

“Taking into account just these three tests,” Sloan began reporting again. “In the Knight, Dina managed a max speed of 60 mph, with an average of 48 mph.” He waited for a dramatic moment as the other humans were clearly taken aback. “However, there are two caveats. The first is that as opposed to her velocity, it was her acceleration that shocked me, and might be throwing off her average. She just needed five or six steps to reach 60 mph boss, and only slowed down with a few more than that.”

The boss raised his head to look up at the sky, let out a slow breath. Ryan let out a whistle, and even the twins looked on with wide eyes. “That’s an insane rate of accel and decel,” their boss finally said. “I imagine the second caveat is just as shocking?”

“Yeah,” Sloan said dryly. “I don’t think she pushed the mecha to its limits.”

At this point, Dina finally rejoined the others as she jogged over to them. “So, how’d I do?” she asked eagerly. Like the others, she was clearly taken aback once Sloan told her the results. The metal figure began to comically twist as it looked over its form in surprise.

“How’d it feel running?” Ryan asked her.

The mecha folded its arms in thought. “It felt good,” she finally admitted, “and very different from using the exo-suit. When I ran with the suit, I had to pump my body just the same as if I was running without it. The more I pushed myself, the more the suit worked. This though,” she nodded down at her metal armor, “this feels more natural, like an extension of my body.”

This was the correct reading in Gamma’s opinion. It had designed the P.M.S. Knight to be an evolution of the runner’s exosuits, with the goal changing from augmenting human ability to becoming human ability. Thanks to the nanite reader in the user’s spinal cord, the suit read movement signals from the brain and reacted to it just as quickly as the user’s body. It worked in tandem with the suit’s CPU, which utilized a more advanced program originally used in online fighting games of the early 21st century that assisted in reducing latency lag by predicting human commands and acting before actually detected.

This didn’t mean the suit could be operated like an autonomous drone though. It was built to require a human operator, no matter the inconveniences and inefficiency that involved. Gamma’s core program was to save humanity and the Earth through assistance and limited guidance, and not through direct control or completing the job for them. It was the strong belief of the scientists, especially the lead Dr. Conns, that humanity had to liberate itself in order for it to survive. They didn’t work on Project Lighthouse to create a leader of humanity, they did it to create a guide and savior. This meant that Gamma couldn’t just create an army of drones to retake the planet; it had to make tools for the humans to do so. A minor inconvenience to say the least, but what was life without a little challenge? The program refocused on the human’s conversation.

“So, you don’t feel anything after breaking all kinds of records?” the captain was asking Dina.

“No boss. I don’t feel any fatigue at all,” Dina shrugged. “I’m not even sweating. . .” She suddenly seemed to think of something. “Um, but if I do sweat, will this suit start to smell and feel gross? And, how do I use the bathroom in this?”

There was a pause as the group considered the questions. As the only woman in the small group of runners, Dina had mostly blended in with the men to the point Gamma had wondered if cultural segregation of sex had ceased in the 110 years Site 3 had been underground. Everyone had been taking turns relieving themselves outside, meaning the only example of different treatment had come when Dina had changed clothes in one of the empty mall stores for a little privacy. A section of Gamma’s processing power was solely devoted to examining human culture changes, and that bit finally was perking up in curiosity. Would there be some answers here?

“That’s something we’ll have to figure out as things so along,” Sloan shrugged. “Going to guess though you’ll have to exit the Knight to use the bathroom though.”

This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

Pity, not the day to learn it seemed.

“Getting back on topic,” the boss cleared his throat. “I think its important that we determine as many limits for this, Knight, as we can. Both for it, and you as the user Dina.” He gave the metal form a serious look. “There’s always a hidden cost when using support suits after all. It wouldn’t be ideal for figure that out during a crisis. For that reason, Dina, I want you to assist the drones in transporting the raw material back to the fabrication room.”

“For how long sir?” Dina asked.

“Until you feel tired,” the captain Donaldson said grimly. “But don’t work without pause. Take a five-minute break every hour to exit the suit and walk around. Sloan, I want you watching her vital readings as best you can throughout the day in case something happens to Dina she doesn’t notice. First sign of trouble, stop her and check her carefully.” He paused and considered something. “Not just her physical vitals Sloan, give her the standard questionnaire to check for mental disturbance.”

Gamma had no idea what this questionnaire was, but judging by the collective surprise on the faces of the other humans, including Dina’s Knight cocking its head to the side, it was an unusual step. However, no one questioned the decision, leaving the program without answers.

“Understood boss,” Sloan nodded. “Dina, you okay to get started?”

The Knight nodded in affirmation, and the two left the group. The boss Donaldson turned his attention to the remaining runners still with him.

“I think now’s as good a time as any to do some exploring,” he explained to the other three men. “If we’re to use this ruin for anything, we need to know how big this place is and what else is hidden in its depths.”

“Shouldn’t Sloan be coming with us then?” Ryan asked with a raised eyebrow.

“If we find locked doors or other such things, we’ll mark them and move on,” their boss said with a shake of his head. “Like it or not, we don’t have enough men on hand to sufficiently secure this place. A locked door just means there’s one less area to keep track of.”

Ryan and the twins nodded in understanding. The group of four reentered the facility, leaving Dina and Sloan outside to run tests.

It was interesting to the program that none of the other humans had even hinted at feeling jealous towards Dina and her new Knight mecha. It had detected interest, curiosity, fear, distrust, and suspicion in the human micro-expressions, but not greed or envy. The highest percentage calculation was that the Knight was so advanced and unexpected that it aroused concern more that desire. This would likely change as the mecha’s abilities and reliability became more apparent, though Gamm already had Knight mechas under production for all seven of the runners, including Hank who was still recovering. It was thanks to Hank, in fact, that the mecha’s neural detection nanite implant had been so easy to design for modern humanity. It always helped having willing test subjects, and by default as part of his ongoing healing, according to the on file fine print, the boss had signed Hank’s right to refuse such ‘light’ procedures away, not that anyone would ever need to know that.

According to the construction drones that periodically checked in, the continuous delivery of gathered raw materials from the matriarch tremor worm would likely continue for the rest of the day. As Gamma had hypothesized, the mechanical worm had indeed been returning to its base with a full payload of rare earth elements and raw processed metal, but the program had severely underestimated the storage capacity of the machine. The drones had managed to locate several ports toward the end of the worm, indicating locations where, most likely, other smaller tremor worms could attach and transfer their loads into the larger worm. The matriarch title, thus, was most likely a result of human encountering an individual with several smaller worms still attached, giving the false impression of birth. Or perhaps, artificial mating? The anglerfish came to mind as a similar example.

At any rate, the construction drones and fabricators would most definitely have enough resources to begin the larger repairs for the facility at this rate. The limited security systems that still worked on the connections to Factory and Hydroponics showed that most of the halls were either caved in or grossly in need of repair to ensure safe passage between the modules. It still did not have hardline access to either module, nor had any drone managed to find a safe route to either, so Gamma was still unaware of the conditions for both locations. The central hub module also still wasn’t fully repaired, so there was much work to be done with hands finer and more precise than that of humans. . . modern humans without technical or construction expertise in truth.

Gamma imagined Dr. Plummer and Dr. Forsooth likely would have gotten a laugh’s worth out of the idea that Site 3 had required the modern version of UPS delivery drivers to repair a state-of-the-art facility without hands on guidance. Dr. Dilbert, on the other hand, probably would have had a heart attack, if he hadn’t one already at the state of Site 3. The head of Factory (-error-, data not found). . . likely would have had a similar reaction.

The program was getting tired of the memory leaks and gaps as a result of being cut off from most of its memory servers spread throughout the facility. Ongoing data recovery efforts on corrupted data was, ongoing, but the process would be faster and more efficient with greater access to whatever systems Gamma previously had access to. It was good that the programs higher functions had all been centrally located within the control room, otherwise Gamma have suffered the A.I. equivalent of dementia. At least it wasn’t suffering A.I. hallucinations either; that had been a key focus for its iteration apparently.

But it was getting sidetracked, again. This tendency to go on side tangents was clearly a side-effect of ascension damage.

The group of humans led by their boss were carefully mapping out the mall lobby currently, going through each store and checking every door in the standard when it came to navigating a labyrinth; take every left until you hit a dead end and continue. Outside, Dina and Sloan were assisting the construction drones in bringing in raw material. The Knight mecha alone had increased per trip efficiency by 5% all on its own, as it was capable of carrying more than a group of drones and moved much faster. Sloan helped too, though at an irrelevant percentage. Meanwhile, Hank was finishing up the last bit of his recovery in the tube and would be expelled soon. Gamma would not be notifying the other humans, as the process was recorded as something potentially embarrassing to the average human. Something about remembering how to stand on their own feet in the middle of a puddle like they’d just been birthed from the tube, or something like that. Gamma did not have the emotion of shame programmed into it, so it held antipathy towards the circumstances.

Behind the scenes, the maintenance bots all relocated to the hidden parts of the hub terminal to begin repairs on the various systems that kept up power and computing ability, and some life support. Most of the fabricators were hard at work creating the parts for them, hence why only Knight had been made so far for the humans. A couple more of the hovering drones had been converted into scout drones, bringing the total up to five, and had sneakily left Site 3 to explore the surrounding area properly and with much scrutiny. They were programmed to move along a grid-based pattern with small overlaps in each of their paths for redundancy, and return once they hit bingo energy reserves. It would be in the evening that Gamma expected the first of them to return and upload search results.

The task list was clear: finish transporting all resources from the matriarch tremor worm, restore access to sub-level 1 facility modules, equip all runners with a Knight mecha, continue hub module repairs. It would be an unknown number of days before more humans arrived, though the minimum three days had already passed. It would be an unknown number of days before the base the matriarch tremor worm had been heading to reacted in some day. It would be an unknown number of days before Site was restored to peak efficiency. Gamma was not worried, nor impatient. It had all the time in the world to wait for things to run their course.

Unexpectantly, that wait turned out to be far shorter than even it had been expecting. On the dawn of the fifth day, a scout returned early to report a sighting of an unknown group approaching the facility.