Your new arms are finally attached and wired into your systems. There's a lengthy back and forth with the Primary Control System to account for their own internal systems, components, actuators, and all manner of other parts which need to operate properly.
As soon as you get access to the motors, you begin raising their charge levels, to allow them to operate properly without overstressing themselves. Once the Primary Control System is finished and everything is checking out, you let your pilot know that the part change is complete.
Seeing that, he searches the repair bay menu you still have onscreen, though you don't know for what until he mumbles to himself, “How do get out of this...?”
You pass that along to the repair bay, telling it to disengage and release you. In the meantime, the man has started poking uncertainly around the outer edges of the monitor that still contains the repair bay menu. This time, he taps randomly, where there are no visuals that look like any kind of button. It's entirely unclear how that might accomplish his goal, but looking at it yourself, there isn't anything labeled that would work.
In any case, you try making another beep sound to alert your pilot while wiping the menu from your monitor. He looks around in confusion, just as the large clamps around you begin to whir. “That worked?” he asks aloud.
Then the vibrations rumble through your frame, shocking the pilot into motion. He grabs the control handles and shoves his feet down to the pedals, just in time for the clamps to release, allowing your full weight to shift back onto your feet. Before that can happen, you alter your automatic balancing to favor your left side to support the vastly heavier Ironside arm.
“Shit!” the man barks, when you immediately begin to pull sharply down on that side anyway. Apparently, your guesswork adjustments weren't nearly enough to fully account for an arm triple the weight of your old one. Your gyros strain to correct the pull while Pilot Assist aids him in fixing your posture, rapidly adjusting your balance in real time.
After two staggering steps to the left, things come under control. Your entire stance is off-balance, much of your weight settling on your left leg, forcing you to keep the knee bent to carry the uneven load. But, as you can see now, you can carry the load.
Checking things over, you've increased your total weight by over twenty percent, to about sixty-seven tons, at least according to the information provided by the repair bay.
In actual operation, it feels far heavier, especially since you are still working on charging the motors in the arms so they can actually move themselves instead of hanging off of you like a dead weight.
When your pilot pulls on the controls to try and lift them up anyway, the Ibex arm can sort of manage, but the unprepared motors in the Ironside attempt to comply, screaming with effort. They make progress since you've gotten most of them partially charged already, but the strain is rapidly beginning to damage the unprepared parts – far more than your original ones did, thanks to it being vastly heavier than the last ones.
You immediately try making a warning sound, which comes out as a garbled series of chirps, and splash a warning across your monitors.
Warning: Motors still charging.
As soon as that catches his attention, you kludge together a graphic from the visuals you loaded from the repair bay, together with some bits and pieces you apparently have in your storage. In the time it takes him to look around in confusion, you put that on-screen too.
It features a vaguely humanoid outline to indicate your overall frame, with the arms flashing red repeatedly, to tell the man not to use them yet.
Like earlier, you have to continuously fire your reactor to build up the energy you need, but this time, you also dump most of your stored up battery power into them as well, to push them closer to the needed charge more quickly. However, you find that your battery on its own doesn't hold enough – by your estimates, your full battery can only store about three cycles worth of power produced by the reactor, while the hundreds of new motors need two or three times that to reach a reasonable charge level.
With that in mind, you do some more quick math, and put up a countdown.
Motors Charged in 15... 14... 13...
You keep going, adding onto the message in real time, while the pilot, thankfully, waits patiently.
3... 2... 1... Complete.
“Alright then, let's see these,” he speaks up, once more pushing to lift the arms up. While the Ibex moves much like your old ones despite being a bit heavier, there's a notable slowness in the way the Ironside arm moves. It isn't from motors struggling this time, it's just slower than the other arms you've experienced.
Whether it's the weight, or the specific motors it uses, or something else, it's hard pin the precise cause using the information you've managed to gather. You have noticed it took less power to charge the each individual motor compared to the Ibex arm though; the total power needed was only slightly higher despite the Ironside arm having almost two and a half times more motors running it. Perhaps that's part of it.
Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.
Whatever the explanation, you know you will need to keep such differences in mind when choosing parts to use.
And none of that is mentioning the sheer size of the arm. Being scaled for a frame thirty percent larger than you, the arm itself is thicker, and longer. Holding them side by side, the tips of the Ibex fingers barely reach the wrist of the Ironside arm. When standing upright, it reaches most of the way to your knees.
Your pilot turns the arms around, inspecting them just as you are. Unlike your remaining Comet parts, which are all painted in a pale blue, with much of the paint heavily faded or worn away by the apparent decades you've spent here, the Ibex and Ironside are colored differently.
The Ironside is a steel gray, somewhat shiny like it was well polished in the past, despite almost all of the paint itself having worn off entirely. There are numerous sections of extra armor attached, 'hardpoints,' as they're called in your frame's system information. Places where extra items can be attached to the external armor. Like, in the case of your new Ironside arm, more armor.
The Ibex arm on your right is in a far better state, appearance-wise, with its dark blue paint significantly better preserved, only showing mild fading over its surface, without much wear and tear to speak of. While it's better than the old Comet arm, it sports nowhere near the armor of your other arm.
It has just one extra armor segment, a rounded portion at the elbow, providing near-complete cover for the joint. More interestingly, there is a flat, bladed attachment on the wrist. At twice the length of your hand, the thin blade doesn't give the most reliable impression, but it could still be good for punching small holes in a target.
Much more impressive is the ballistic rifle apparently built into the Ironside arm. Unlike your old phaser, it is listed as occupying a good deal of the internals of your entire left arm, with the end of the barrel accessible from your palm. Momentarily looking past the arm's balance-destroying weight and your lack of ammo to fire it, you get the impression that it could be a strong weapon.
Apparently satisfied, your pilot turns, and pushes you into a walk. It is an awkward sort of walk, almost a limp, in order to keep the proper support under your left side, but with the help of Pilot Assist, he manages it smoothly, moving toward the left wall of the hanger, where the Bogatyr is stuck in storage.
Now that you can actually see where you're going and aren't forced to muddle forward to avoid crashing, it's far shorter walk across the hanger, even with your uneven gait.
On the way, a new thought occurs to you, belatedly suggested by your sub-processors. Considering that such a long time passed since the latest records and your current time, it would be prudent to see if your pilot knows anything. Being sixteen years old, he should have knowledge of events that happened within that span. If you openly communicate that you are an artificial intelligence which has been stored for a long time and lack recent knowledge, he should answer questions about what has happened.
You make it halfway through formulating a way to ask these questions, when a counterargument surfaces. Your pilot could possibly be enemies with AI such as yourself. In fact, when the repair bay reported that it had fix your cockpit, with the exception of some of your AI systems, the human was visibly relieved.
At the time, you believed that to be a response to the repairs completing. But, if you were to recontextualize it as your pilot being relieved that your AI systems were not fixed, that would cast doubt on whether it is a good idea to be open in your communication.
For now, you put that idea on pause for further consideration. You are approaching the jammed hanger doors already. Stepping right up to them, they easily dwarf your frame. But your pilot wastes no time grabbing onto the huge doors through the narrow gap in the middle and attempting to pull them apart by force.
Nothing. Even when he has you trying to pull with your full strength, you find your load rising and dipping, balance and force sensors spitting out warnings. While the Ironside arm has plenty more to give, the Ibex arm simply can't counterbalance the amount of force properly. If you were to simply override that and push harder anyway, rather than prying the doors open, you'd simply shove yourself away.
So it's not as much a matter of strength as it is leverage, it would seem. Nevertheless, you immediately begin increasing the charge levels in the motors running your arms. While you've had them at half charge, following the advice you read on suggested MMRs earlier, powering them more will provide more overall strength you can use.
While you're on that, your pilot considers the enormous doors briefly, before turning sideways, attempting to wedge your new left arm into the gap. He gets it... sort of, and you immediately discharge your battery into the relevant motors to give them as much of an advantage as you can.
He twists the controls hard, pushing and wiggling to get your shoulder wedged into the gap. With that, your leverage issue is solved. He pushes steadily forward, attempting to force the jammed doors. The load levels on the Ironside arm rise. The heat spilling out of it rises in tandem. There's a creak from the doors, but no change yet.
You pull the power from the Ibex motors, dumping all of that into the Ironside arm too, bringing the whole thing up to one hundred percent – what must be the 'redline' spoken of among your help text. The power output continues to multiply as the doors shudder, steaming plumes of heat spewing from beneath your armor.
To your surprise, since the motors didn't perfectly hit redline, some of them continue to rise a point or two past one hundred percent. When you give another experimental nudge, they go even further.
Apparently, the motors' redline isn't a hard, physical limit on the energy they can store, it's just what is considered safe, before the heat becomes too unsustainable. And it absolutely is unsustainable, already in the process of pushing your heatsinks to their limits in trying to disperse all of that heat outside of your body, just from redlining one of your arms.
But the doors are releasing a steady, grinding groan now. They budge just a tiny bit wider open, allowing you a better look through. Even if it's only at the edge of your vision, the Bogatyr is there, clearly heavily modified, visible just by the numerous colors of the parts attached.
Refocusing on the doors, your pilot is leaning all the way forward, teeth gritted as he presses the control stick to its maximum limit, his own arm visibly shaking from the heavy force feedback such a move incurs.
Even now, you consider your options. If you really push it and crank up your motors, you're almost certain you can force the doors open, even if it burns out the Ironside arm in the process. Or, is there some other method you could try instead?
----------------------------------------
Vote:
[ ] Push harder!
[ ] Try something else
-What?
[ ] Write-in
-Further Consideration-
[ ] Tell the pilot you are an AI
[ ] Don't tell the pilot you are an AI