"Space, the final frontier, gaze into the endless dark and imagine the places beyond the lights of stars, planets lost in the endless void and galaxies long forgotten beyond the reach of our small existences. Those are the voyages of the space station of captain Immortal, his indomitable will striving to go where no human leg. . eh .. no leg . ."

"Oh shut up Krogar, we have no fucking legs to step anywhere!" Cirse's mood was still grumpy, but Krogar considered it a victory, forcing her out of her stupor.

"I know you are happy to be the tin can that you have always been again, but I happen to have some issues with it." She continued.

"What? We have our space station now, no chronic pains, absolute freedom, no limping anymore?" Krogar lifted his virtual eyebrow.

"Let me be for a while, enjoy the space, you do not need me for your big exploration plans anyway." Cirse got a bit clogged when he mentioned the limping, Krogar could tell he had scored a point.

After that, he could feel Cirse's presence disappeared into some corners of the space station and he was left alone.

He did not mind, stretching the sensors of the station to its limits he could feel the space around him, all that vast space, uncountable worlds and wonders.

It emanated the feeling of freedom, he felt it for the first time in a long, long time. Up to this point, it could be said that he was the victim of his circumstances. Always trying to avoid a crisis, reacting to what the world had in store for him.

"Finally, finally the world will have to cope with what I have in store for it, not the other way around." The first who had felt it were the scientists that had been dumped at a backwards planet with no means of interplanetary communication. It might have been harsh, but they should be grateful for their lives, as AIs typically did not even bother with human values.

Krogar focused on the space station that was his body. it was rather large consisting of many interconnected parts, its design being very modular with the sections of various shapes and sizes, its awkward shape having no impact on its travel speed due to the lack of air resistance. With the number of technologies researched on the station, there was enough resources to use for development and customization, some of the key technologies like cloaking having being already implemented.

It was logical the station will be a target for search parties, but after checking all the data on board, Krogar understood that finding it would be a pipe dream in the vastness of space, given that they would not act overly suspicious.

"What to do, what to do?" It was strange, but after all the time of just surviving, he had not much motivation to do anything.

"Isn't it obvious?"

"Huh? You are back already?" Krogar caught Cirse's stray thought.

"You have forgotten about Nas'Librion, those Gifted fuckers? About their fascist system of power and distribution of energy? I know that it was a completely different world, but just imagine what can you accomplish with resources and technology like this." Krogar realized Cirse had lived all her life in that system, in contrast to him, who was just passing by.

"Oh, we can certainly construct a system of space power plant stations supplying a planet and . ."

"Please bad jokes aside Krogar." Cirse was finally using his true name, after he had lost his body. "You know full well what I am about to point out."

"We can certainly help here and there, but any extensive charitative action will only endanger us Cirse." He said seriously.

"Of course, I am not asking for much, we are not galactic heroes."

After a short discussion, they have agreen on some simple ideology and Cirse went to explore the station, feeling like a guardian of the galaxy.

"Oh women, they think of something and. . . man provide!" Krogar was muttering with his most remote speaker. Of course it was just an analogy, as the question of gender was only marginally relevant for them both.

He ploted their course, trying to simulate the orbit of a comet, not wanting to burn fuel needlessly.

"The first task should be to build some construction robots for making weapon modules." The station had roughly about two hundred research modules plus some critical ones for movement and life support. Most of them were the size of your standard living room, but there were even big ones capable of housing whole factories. Krogar decided to build four types of machinery, autonomous maintenance robot Type 12, autonomous construction robot Type 11, autonomous research robot Type 10, research manipulation robot Type 20, construction robot Type 21, maintenance robot Type 22, autonomous security robots Type 19 and security robots Type 29.

Looking at all the machinery he had build, he found out that he ended up with more than he had originally wanted. The series 1X were bots with basic AI capable of making own decisions, but only in the frame of a given concept, those with numbers 2X were just specialized "stupid" labourers that were to be linked to their 1X operators. He decided to go with a logical construct of research -> construction -> maintenance, X0 -> X1 -> X2, with the last step being defense as X9.

"So many bots, I am beginning to feel possessive." Krogar decided to call them bots, as the names were a mouthful. He produced three construction groups designated as C1, C2 and C3 each consisting of one T11 and ten T21, two security groups S1 and S2 each of which had two T19 and ten T29. The research component had not yet been build, but he intended to produce a number of them. He also produced two maintenance groups M1, M2 that were following the pattern of the C series.

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Listing all existing units, it currently looked like this and he found himself having an itch to grow the list bigger.

Research Space Station

T10 - 0

T11 - 3

T12 - 2

T19 - 4

T20 - 0

T21 - 30

T22 - 20

T29 - 20

Personnel Transport Vessel - 2

His next step was building two small, but effective weapon platform modules, each having one laser weapon and one electromagnetic weapon which he dubbed Gauss 1. It was nothing fancy, but it ought to provide some basic security.

As the station drifted through space, the new additions to its arsenal were slowly being build and time flew, as the snail speed of the sublight motion pushed the station onward.

"Fine, third research group finished." Krogar used the same structure for the group as he had used for C1, each leading unit having ten subservient bots.

"Damn, I have eaten through our reserves of metal a bit. I should start looking for some resources." At that moment, he felt a series of violent vibrations and had an ominus feeling.

"Fuck, extensive damage of three modules." He quickly focused his attention on the spot and could only evaluate the damage of what seemed to be a colision with a small space debris.

"Crap, I have repurposed too many sensors as my sensory organs." The station had some measures to address the problem of space debris, but it had never been intended for space travel. Krogar immediately began slowing down and focused all sensors on debris detection, while serching his database for the information how other spaceships coped with the problem.

He found out multiple solutions. The most hi-tech solution was to use short bursts from antigravity engines to deflect any projectiles, or shoot it down with smaller gauss rifles, which was actually more energy-efficient for small isolated objects. Some used lasers, which was quicker, but less efficient as the objects ended up vaporized and that consumed more energy than to just deflect them.

Krogar ended up using the engines, but in his case the problem lay in repurposing the sensors, thus he did not need to do much other than deciding to construct more sensors to prevent this in the future.

Still, the thought of his resources thinning out remained.

He wanted to look around, but reminded himself of what had just happened and forced himself to wait for his construction groups to finish their current task. After he had repaired everything and produced more sensors, he allowed himself to plot a new course. He had chosen an asteroid field with an orbit around a large planet. it was adventageous as it did not require landing, he just would have to synchronize the speeds and that was it.

He thought about waiting to get there, but after imagining the long wait of three years, he decided to use warp engines that were, thank all gods in heaven, present as the besic facility of the space station.

"Oh, I see you have found a target, who are we going to save?" He immediately received a communication from his companion when he activated the warp engines.

"Our ass, we will be out of metal soon."

"Oh . .I see." It was certainly not the reply the space guardion princess expected.

"It should not take long before we are at orbit of the targetted planet." Krogar began analyzing the solar system they were heading to.

"Is it populated?" An obvious question followed.

"Look yourself, you are capable of doing everything I do." Krogar bought a few minutes of silence for himself.

"Eh, I do not know." An unsure whining came out of Cirse a considerable while later.

"I do not know either. It is not easy to guess the presence of life on a planet, especially a primitive one." Actually he should not be any smarter than Cirse in this regard, he thought the current situation was due to her unease related to beign an AI. She was reluctant to act, resulting in her temporarily lowered capabilities.

And he would make sure that it really was just a temporary state.

"Cirse, look at what the research drones are doing, I hope that I have not given them too much freedom. They better not try something dangerous and blow us up." He decided to involve Cirse in some action, it would do her only good, she had been hoofing and poofing about her existence for long enough.

When they finally arrived at their destination, Krogar managed to park them next to the asteroid field that was orbiting the planet. He did not know if the term asteroid field was right, but concerning himself with such details had never been his strong side. The important part was that the pieces of rocks were big enough get something from them.

He considered parking the station behind the field, but considering the decreasing speeds of stable orbits as objects distanced themselves from the center, he would have been lagging behind the field after some time, which was too bothersome to concern himself with. Sticking the station on the same stable orbit as the asteroid field was positioned at seemed like a better option.

Krogar decided to shovel the group M1 into one of the personnel transports and send them to extract resources to the edge of the asteroid field, as its depths seemed too dangerous even for an AI to maneouver inside.

"I need more methods of transportation too." He thought, arriving at the conclusion that he needed a proper dry dock to construct ships, which was obviously no small facility.

While they days passed by, Krogar had managed to build three more maintenance teams, increasing their numbers to five, as they proved the most effective in material extraction. Having fifty maintenance slave-bots seemed like a big number, but their size was not even of an average person, making the station far from being crowded with bots.

Krogar looked as the bots were happily extracting materials, having an obvious thought.

"What limited the growth of an AI? Why haven't I seen their extensive use in the database?" He mused and began searching his database for possible causes. After a quick search, he had found the reason. There were some cases, where the Siva Republic and The Namid Empire tried to use autonomous AI on large scale, but their experiments had not yielded good results due to several reasons.

The first problem was that even though AIs were very good at solving specific problems, it was hard to program a suitable higher concepts for them like ideology, the worst classic case being the silly idea of program them to strive for "peace", where the state of peace was defined as a total absence of bloodshed. It naturally ended with the Ais trying to kill all life, because logically the most peaceful state was the one without it.

The second problem adding to the first was, that all the enemy needed to do was to hack the operating system of the AI, or just damage it enough to turn it into a silly nuisance. Although there were many defences against hacks, the defences were only as strong as the people making them were smart, resulting in a situation where races that were intelectually superior to The Namid Empire had even turned its army against them, the whole project ending in a disaster.

The Last historical reason for not using Ais too much was an expedition from another galaxy, it was termed as a probing attack of unknown AI life forms that were capable of using most of the advanced autonomous systems to their advantage and had caused extreme damage, despite their initial force being relatively small.

All the above reasons led to the state where artificial intelligence had been kept relatively primitive and above all, always dedicated to specific tasks with human controllers. It could be said that the program Krogar had been product of, was the highest level of complexity and all the AIs produced in it had their actions severely restricted by a human operator, or by severe limitations of their resources.

All went according to the plan, but before Krogar let Cirse loose as the heroine of the oppressed, he wanted to build up the base a little, which had to continue with their energy resources. Sadly, their energy resource seemed to be antimatter to his great joy . . Meaning they had to find something alternative, as they were currently unable to produce it themselves.

"It cannot be helped, I should upgrade the station up to the norm." After another search of his database, Krogar uncovered the standard process of handling energy - find an energy source -> compress it into antimatter -> distribute it in batteries to where you need it. He decided to implement more solar panels and wait for the drones to gather more resources to build something more permanent, as the construction of the energy facility was going to be quite an extensive project.

It took a few days before the station had enough resources to build a new megalomaniac project, the warp reactor. The concept was similar to the warp drive the station used for movement, but the device was a bit unstable, meaning most of the military ships did not use it. It initiated a spacetime distortion similar to the one created for the interstellar movement of space ships, but it was flawed on purpose, creating a controlled failure of a warp field with a piece of matter left inside, leading to total annihilitaion of said matter, creating its equivalent in energy according to the notorious matter-to-energy equation.

Naturally, one could not just threw there a bit of yogurt and expect everything to go as planned, the reactor needed to be build for a specific volume and type of matter. To make it secure, Krogar intended to build a separate space station for the reactor, in case it would explode. The new power-generating station needed its own basic facilities, making the whole operation much bigger than he had planned, but it could not be helped. Who wanted to be powered with some half-assed solution like solar panels? He did not want to wait half a year to amass the necessary energy to perform a single serious maneuver.

When he looked again, he saw that it would take much longer to extract the resources and build the whole thing, but he was not limited by time anymore, he had all the time in the universe, so he waited patiently while watching his drones work.