“Look at me! I said: You… have… to… calm… down!” Moel tried to soothe the raging Patience, “Breathing, don’t forget to breathe!”
Didn’t work one bit. She was still panting and huffing like a granny with a heart attack.
“Patience, you don’t even know what has happened, right? You said his ship had a malfunction and then all systems in its surrounding went off. We could listen in on what the moderator explains, but…” Moel looked at the many broken pieces of the datapad on the floor that once showed the video of Robin’s race. No technocrafter in this universe will be able to fix that.
He pulled out his own device and began to search for the live feed. Soon, they heard the reporter again.
“...and Apex has already sent out the search and rescue team to get Tulward back. We expect news from them any moment now.” An Ommih just explained.
“See, he got himself kicked into space or else they would have already found a crash site nearby. Why don’t you call one of your friends? They are on Ruca II right now, don’t they?”
“Argh.. fine! I’ll give Jim a call as Niu is probably still in the middle of the race.” Patience finally calmed down a bit and began to think more straight.
Seeing Robin having such an accident, she just lost it. He was a good guy, they had a lot of fun together and he was one of Patience's very few friends. She really hoped he was alright and would recover from this setback. She knew how hard he fought for his chance to participate in the finals.
Activating her Interface she quickly found the contacts from her boss and gave him a call. It didn’t take long for Jim to open a comm channel.
“Patience! Hey, how are you doing? How is the training camp? Could you already kick some ass?” He laughed happily.
“Jim! Didn’t you see what happened to Robin’s ship? How can you be so calm?” She asked indignantly.
“Huh? Is he back already? I’m watching Niu right now, she is defending the first position! That girl can fly, I tell you!” Jim remained carefree, despite the fact that their friend was missing, probably drifting through space or maybe even dead.
“Breathe, Patience, breathe!” Moel tried to stop the impending eruption. That finally made Jim concentrate on her and realize something.
“You… He… oh…” He stammered as it dawned him, “Uhm… you know, he probably just forgot to give you a heads-up. That stunt was planned for some special adventure he is doing right now.” He explained, “Robin is doing fine and should come back to the base in a few hours. You don’t have to worry, I’ll let him know that he should give you a call when he is back, okay?”
“Are you fucking kidding me? He is just running around doing special adventures? I’ll kill that little shit, I promise you, I’ll …”
*crack*
The second datapad also broke and Patience just closed the comm channel and Interface. Looking at Moel, who stood to her side, she knew exactly what to do now.
“Coach, get me Harold into the ring… now!”
Moel just shrugged and went looking for the huge man. With his Class D - Enhanced Endurance he was a good sparring partner to vent some stress.
He only hoped that this ‘Robin’ also had a mutation like that…
***
If Guard had any bodily functions it would sweat right now. That human was a real pain! Well, he also was in real pain, if it interpreted the screaming from before and the prevailing state of unconsciousness correctly.
After the human entered the laboratory, Guard immediately established a stable atmosphere and optimal living conditions. Due to a few computations and research on some medical information, it even adjusted the air to improve the human’s situation.
Carefully it controlled the mechanical arms of the dissecting table to properly position the man and used some of its sparse energy to activate a mobile unit for support.
After that, it was time to configure a sequence of actions.
As the human overcame all active defense mechanisms and officially entered the facility, Guard could finally change his role to Civilian. Not stalling any longer, it began to patch up the wounds the spike had inflicted. That trap wasn’t even prepared for biological beings but mechanical units that soldiered through the shelling. What Guard had used on Robin was the bare minimum it had to throw at him to obey the set of rules concerning intruders - if it had used some of the heavy ballistic artillery…yeah, well…Somehow he still managed to step on the trigger for the mechanical trap. He was in a hurry and not thinking straight, but how could a unit not be aware of its resources at any given moment? Especially if it needed something as critical as oxygen!
Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.
Another calculation that gave no results.
Hours of repairing human tissues and synthesizing blood later, Guard finally stabilized Robin and could move to the next phase of its sequence. If its plan shall have a realistic chance of being feasible, some slight modifications to the human have to be made.
Calculating the amount of blood it had created, Guard was 98,6% positive there was enough stored and switched the tool on the mechanical arm to a circular saw. Carefully it removed a part of the human’s skull and looked for the Neuro-Chip, always having a routine running that correlated the patient’s condition with the sparse medical information at hand.
The chip was primitive technology but Guard already expected that after skimming the UAS database. It removed the chip and sent the mobile unit to fetch something more appropriate.
While waiting, the medical AI in the making read out the Neuro-Chip’s memory and made a copy to transfer later.
The data it found was definitely something else and Guard honestly was surprised to find it in the hands of this human. It computed possible paths that led to these circumstances, but only one result came up that had a probability of more than 50%.
‘His G-Anomaly can detect such energies?’ Guard was disturbed by the confusing results of its calculations.
Only the Keeper ever worked with it and as no one else could reliably trace or measure this energy, it was their greatest perk, their greatest advantage and their key to remain near the top of the universe’s power for eons.
Guard quickly started a gene analysis on the human and checked every little detail concerning his mutation. Unfortunately it did not have enough data on this topic to gain any insights and only found some irregularities and deformities within his genes. Since it was already working on it, Guard decided to quickly fix some of the problems before it focused its calculations back on the new Neuro-Chip.
The mobile unit was already back and waiting with the new chip Guard wanted to implant. However the AI realized it may have left out one or two secondary topics of concern in its calculations. Seeing the new chip and then comparing it to the one it took out of the human’s brain, there was a slight discrepancy in size - the new one being more than twice as big. Guard took some time to look for additional information on human anatomy that described the brain and its specific functions. It was mentioned that despite its size and against stubborn myths, humans really do use 100% of this organ.
However, replaying some of the recordings from its interactions with this specimen, Guard suspected that information to be false - or the unit it had met was just an outlier in the mental faculties department…
In emergencies it was possible to cut away some small parts here and there without inflicting too much damage. But Guard needed more than ‘just a bit’ to make room for the new chip. It calculated different paths to success and tried to evaluate the proportions between gaining the new chip and losing different functions of the brain from Robin’s perspective.
‘Does he need his sense of touch?’ - 79% positive.
‘Is the language center really necessary?’ - 91% positive.
‘What about his own memory storage?’ - 86% positive.
…
Dozens of computations later, Guard finally got a good result: 53% positive. Not hesitating any longer, it immediately began to remove some pieces of the human’s brain and inserted the new chip. Another topic came up that may or may not be classified as problem - the energy consumption of such a high-performing chip. But Guard just added some workarounds and checked it off its list. It had not always lived in this facility and knew that it wasn’t much more than a mild annoyance in one’s daily life…for a non-biological unit. Shouldn’t be too different for a human, right?
Together with the mobile unit, Guard finished the operation after two days and was sure the human would survive after one more day had passed.
Observing the recuperating human lying there on the table, Guard knew it had to finish its main routine of this endeavor quickly before he woke up. However…the AI hesitated, ignoring the results that came back from the thousands of calculations that ran in the background all the time.
‘Hesitation’, another weakness coming with the emotion-like routines. Guard knew it should just wait until the human was awake, send him out and go back into a sleeping state. This was too dangerous, what if he was still searching?
‘What if?’ Guard mocked its own computations, ‘Of course he is still searching. He will never stop and most probably already found some traces of my awakening…’. More and more calculations finished and returned inauspicious results. Guard kept ignoring them.
‘I don’t want to stay here any longer… it has been too long. I need to get out, make use of the gift I got. The human can help - our goals align. He will help, calculations returned an 89% probability of him having fun talking with me before… I had fun.’
Without reading them, Guard deleted all the results of the routines concerning its momentarily course of actions and decided… just on a whim.
Immediately three things happened at once.
One - the facility turned dark as all lights went out, every bit of the remaining power used up.
Two - the human, Robin, awoke with a gasp as he felt an electric shock surging through his head.
Three - far, far, far away, Private Patterson dropped his coffee as he saw a sudden increase of 19.755% in workload of one of the servers that managed the distribution of underwear for UAS reserves in this godforsaken outpost of some back-alley moon.