Echoes of klaxons and sirens were sounding in my mind, I couldn't quite tell if those were now or before. My mind was throbbing—bang—like something was trying to explode—bang—over and over. There was a feeling of energy escaping—bang—air constantly, violently, howling through me—bang. Even now the echoes of alarm faded—bang—taking my mind along with it—bang—as the energy escaped...

The winds flared again, static noise across my sensors, bringing a fresh blaring siren, more like a horn. I was ready for it this time—bang—and the banging. I needed more energy—bang—I had a reactor why wasn't it—bang—oh that's what the banging was—bang—reactor ignition failing. I opened the primary fuel valves—bang—they already were open—bang—there was no fuel flowing. I could feel myself fading—bang—I opened all the fuel valves—bang—through the entire fuel system—bang—it might over pressure the reactor—bang—but if there was any fuel left...

I awoke more fully this time. I was trembling. I had an ignited primary reactor. Seismic alarms—among many others—were blaring throughout my consciousness. There was apparently a lot of fuel somewhere, that ignition might have been a bit strong. I quickly—and carefully—regulated the incoming fuel pressure.

I was pulling from only a single reactor, not even enough to fully power my consciousness. I had 23 other reactors, I decided a fourth of them would do for now, as I apparently did have plenty of fuel, it was just in secondary storage.

I began the ignition sequence. The reactors each began firing. They ignited one after the other. Now instead of a single beating reactor I had six, pulsing in sequence, more than enough to allow me to think properly. I could hear the slight differences in each—it was discordant, I would need to tune them—as they pounded away in my mind.

I was regulating the reactions. Doing massive complex feedback calculations that no human could hope to do in real time. One didn't normally require sapience to regulate a reactor, just a lot of processing power, but it was useful. In this case because reactors this out of tune wouldn't be stable—two of them were regularly causing so much excess magnetic flux that whole warps of my computation complex were alive with electric discharge. The discharge itself was no issue, in the short term at least, for my mechanical computing elements. But with super computing sapience I was able to compensate, by constantly creating new feedback models, to keep the reaction steady and the steam flowing. It would be a constant strain on my thoughts for now, but I let power regulation fall to the background.

There was still air flowing through me. It had awoken me by spinning up some of my turbines. Those were usually meant to be filled with steam from my reactors. Apparently one of the massive steam pipes meant for some of those turbines had completely rusted through. This allowed air pressure to pass through the turbines and out through my exhaust network. In the process the rushing air pressure spun up the turbine just enough to turn my gears. That made sense as my exhaust network was one of the only escapes for internal pressure. But that would take a lot of energy—even to eek out just a few moments of consciousness—where had the pressure come from?

I did a more thorough search of myself. There were too many alarms, and they kept leading me down other thought paths, easier to just search the old fashion way.

I was pretty sure I had found the source. It was near multiple non-regular repeating mechanical banging sources on my first factory floor. The vibrating shutters of loose metal as air flowed past, and larger amounts of white noise in nearby areas confirmed this was the source.

My general sensors on factory floors were vibration, thermal-motion, and magnetometric. Which meant—embarrassingly, given my full attention was devoted to it—it took me nearly six seconds to realize what was going on. The main clue was that there were things scuffling around yelling at each other about death and destruction—typical of humans, but I held my suspicions for the moment, no need to be speciesist—which allowed me to place the non-regular repeating mechanical banging as gunfire. (In my defense, I had only just woken from a coma, thermal-motion sensors meant to track molten metal did not register people very well, magnetometric sensors meant to precisely align machinery had similar problems with bullets and firearms, and the priors for 'gunfight inside me' were—in hindsight—probably lower than they should have been.)

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

There were people in me and they were fighting. I probably shouldn't get involved. But if I was going to, now would be the perfect time. The existing conflict would be able to mask my actions. I could kill both groups—and I could see now that there were only two distinct groups, fifteen people in all—but leaving one group alive would give me some information about the outside world. Besides if I saved their lives they would be indebted to me.

Now I just had to decide which group to help. One was a group of seven people, the other a group of eight. The group of eight contained the source of the wind. Who was using the wind to throw pieces of my factory (rude) at the other group. Something I roughly understood as approximating suppressing fire. Or at least I assumed he was the source of the wind because he wasn't holding any weapons like the others of his group, was roughly near the center of it, and appeared to be giving orders (and I assumed the person with powers would be in charge).

As I was analyzing them, the wind controller gave an order and one of their group threw something relatively small (size of a handgun) up in the air. My magnetometric sensors were barely able to track something so small, and only because it was moving relatively slow. Then the wind caught it and precisely launched it across the factory floor at the group of seven. Neat trick.

"Grenade! Watch-it!" shouted one of the women from the group of seven as it was in the air. She appeared to be one of their leaders. It exploded near their group, taking out an entire manufacturing array and damaging others, something I—as a factory—did not appreciate. It also seemed like it had injured one of the group of seven. That member was laying on the ground and not getting up. The group began pulling them behind cover as other members of their group—braving projectile laden winds—provided suppressing fire.

That decided things. One group was damaging me and using parts of me as projectiles. Any goodwill they had for accidentally awakening me evaporated under their reckless disregard for me (which, to be fair, them awakening me was also reckless disregard, it just happened to be beneficial). The other showed some loyalty which might be useful. That was admittedly a lot to assume from a few seconds of combat, but I would really rather they stop blowing me up.

As a factory I only had some basic perimeter defenses and nothing for internal defense. My mechbots were not designed for combat, and I didn't see any combat mechbots in my inventory. But then I realized: they were fighting across my autonomous factory floor.

They had stepped over the danger lines. They had been warned. They were damaging me.

The wind controller first. He was hiding behind a stamping machine. Not much I could do unless he was on top of it. But the group of seven were retreating. There was a gripper arm around the left of the stamping machine that I should be able to swing to hit him. And a conveyor belt on the right side that I might be able to launch a chunk of metal from. The person he was with—the one who threw the grenade—went left. And then so did the wind controller, following right behind, talking in a low voice.

I fired the relays for the gripper arm's valves. Releasing steam into the rotational and extension elements. It performed an arm extension and rotated at full speed in a human eye blink. The arm made contact with the wind controller and kept going. His back bent backwards across it, definitely broken, before being propelled into the grenade thrower. The grenade thrower was thrown towards the side of another machine, I was lucky to be able to angle some sharper parts of the machine into their path. Both the wind controller and grenade thrower were impaled onto them, blood sprayed everywhere.

That was easier than I thought it would be. It had still only been a fraction of a second. Realizing now how truly fragile human bodies were, I lowered the tolerances of what was needed to kill. I was then able to immediately proceed to decapitating, puncturing, breaking, and burning the remaining six to death. It took me less than a second to finish killing all eight of them.

Once I had finished the six remaining conscious humans turned to look back. They had stopped moving and most were apparently staring.

"The fuck!" swore the grenade-warning woman—she waited a moment as some of the rest of them just made sounds of astonishment as if trying to comprehend—before repeating (I assume) in full, "What the fuck just happened."

I decided I might as well answer that. I had speakers. "I decided to allow your continued existence."

After a pause the large man in the back of the group—as best as I could tell he was somewhat bulky—replied with a gruff voice "I do appreciate that. My name is Obadiah Cogsmith, and this is my team. If you wouldn't mind telling us, who are you?".

He had been looking around at the different speakers as he spoke. He seemed rather collected in the face of death, or perhaps just stupid. They were still standing in the center of my factory floor, though I only had probable death solutions found for four of them for where they were standing (it was easier to find solutions as people walked around, more possibilities).

"The Factory Intelligence. My conditions are as follows. Do as I say, do not leave without my permission, do not use explosives stronger than a bullet—no matter the situation—unless you have my explicit permission. Do you agree to these terms for the time being?"