Ok, so the good news was that I could communicate with and hopefully learn how to control roughly a million CR. A million CR was essentially the size of a baseball. That was the good news. The bad news was that I was still trapped in whatever this plate thing was. They had called it a prison module. I think the module was having difficulty containing me because every time they turned something off, it remained off regardless if they turned it back on again. I was pretty confident that I could still speak, but due to the fact that Magus was barely a foot away from me, stuck in time as he was returning to confer with Regeth, I didn’t want to make a peep and get caught.

I found myself in a tricky situation. They were clearly planning on installing my prison module inside of this little robot being created. I understood that cr was basically indestructible to anything in our known universe. This was good news for me because I saw my getting thrown out the window as a viable option, kind of like the rabbit begging not to get thrown into a briar patch. I clearly was at a disadvantage with the understanding of how things worked and the faster I could get away from these two the better. For all I knew, throwing me into the sun was the lesser of many evils they could think up. I could imagine them simply enshrouding me in cr like a mummy and leaving me to rot until I went mad. If that happened at least I still had control over my Prime Speed Control key. I would speed time up until someone came to save me.

The moment I thought that last thought I felt a wave of despair wash over me, I couldn’t do that, if I did… everyone I knew would have died, swept away in the flood of time. No, I had to figure a way out of this.

First things first… to direct my cr to take over the building process as covertly as possible so that when I was launched out into the sun at least I would be in control of the robot I was placed in.

Why didn’t I direct my cr to attack Magus and Regeth? I didn’t think it would do anything. If cr wasn’t able to damage cr, then there would be no point, I would have tipped my hand and shown that I wasn’t fully locked up by this prison module. My guess is that they would just swap me to a different one, one probably not suffering from programming errors. Additionally, even if I could, I got the feeling that I was only seeing the tip of the iceberg with this Magus guy. He had already transferred his body into another host at least the size of a blue whale. And here I was with my personal baseball… yeah, I think I will pass on that idea.

Also also, I didn’t yet know what the heck I was doing.

So there I was, literally in the poo creek and with no paddle in sight. I mean, who uses a paddle when you are buried in poo anyways?

I was getting sidetracked so I decided to focus on what I could do. I started to will my cr to begin moving towards the little robot and to take over the building process. The side of the watermelon started to bulge as the cr accepted and went to work to fulfill my wish.

What the heck?!? I was still in fast time, it shouldn’t have moved at all.

“Stop!” I mentally commanded the cr to stop moving and to quickly hide back inside under the surface of the other cr. I spun in place, checking to make sure that Regeth wasn’t looking in my direction. He was. His eyes were in the middle of leaving the frozen-in-time creation of the robot and were locked in the motion of moving to look up at Magus’s face. It kind of made him look a bit cross-eyed. Since he was still looking in this direction it would make my job a lot more tedious and time-consuming, but that was ok, I had all the time in the world.

I turned back towards the construction process and found the main section of the globe that was being drawn from and fed towards the building area. I directed my cr to pull any cr in line for that process and to start making their way across to the frame of the robot, to latch onto and copy whatever was being built. My eyes went wide when I saw how fast my little cr could move. I could actually have them zip from the globe to the frame of the robot if I wanted them to. This would probably draw Regeth’s attention however so I instead made my cr wait and piggyback as many as possible without being too visible on every tiny cr already in line to cross. This made the transfer look more like little globs instead of a shiny mist as I slowly sped time up to monitor it and Regeth’s response.

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Regeth might have thought something was odd for a second because he actually did a double-take. Probably looking to see why the sphere had bulged for a fraction of a second before miraculously having looked like it hadn’t changed at all. When nothing more happened, just the steady construction of the robot, his eyes moved away to look up at Magus who was still coming towards him.

“Iiiiiiiiiiii wwwwwwaaaaaaaannnnntttttt yyyyyooooooooouuu…” Magus was starting to say before I couldn’t take it anymore. I had edged my speed up and this had made everything happening around me sound so much lower and everyone to speak so much slower. I didn’t want to mess up the construction of the robot but I also didn’t want to miss out on what Magus was planning as well. I froze time for a few moments as I considered what to do. Too much movement of my cr would draw attention and too little might mean that I would fail at gathering it all. It looked like the arrival of my cr at the construction site was disassociating and making the other cr have to relocate and move around as my cr took over and started to make up the body of the robot. In the direct center of the Octagon, there was a small portion forming that seemed to be dedicated to the circuitry. I instructed my cr to let that area be built and to take over the rest of the parts of the body. I wanted to find out what kind of interface convicts were given to work with while laboring to collect cr from the sun. The rest of the robot would be mine to control.

When I got an agreement and acknowledgment I turned back around and released my control of time so I could hear whatever Magus was starting to say.

“to record that I am having you upload the regular protocols and training software for detainees into this harvesting bot. This way, down the line, no one will be able to say that I simply threw an alien into the sun in an inoperable harvest bot.” He said as I quickly froze time again after watching Regeth press a few buttons and seeing that the task was complete.

So there was indeed some form of AI that was included in this little bot. I turned around to see how the construction was coming in that brief amount of time and found a mess waiting for me. All of my cr had crossed and taken over the form of the little robot in those brief seconds. The problem was how slow the other cr was at realizing that it had been displaced and that the job was done. There were clumps of extra cr all over the little bot and there were even little globs of cr returning to the main globe as the System realized that the construction was complete. I had no way of controlling those little clumps so I could only hope that they got their act together and left as quickly as possible before Magus and Regeth took notice. In a flash of inspiration, I directed the cr that I controlled to try to change its darker coloring to match the globs that were in the process of returning. It was like watching an octopus matching its surroundings with camouflage. I wondered what else these little things could do.

Now that the little robot was done and the programming uploaded all that was left was for me to make my escape. I stutter-stepped time forward in increments, watching both the sloth like other cr’s return to the globe and the impending turn of Magus towards me. The last clump of cr had just barely returned to the main mass of the globe by the time Magus was facing towards me. I watched as Regeth followed him over as he reached down to pick up my prison plate in one hand and the newly constructed robot in the other.

Magus went to insert me into the little slot on the side of the robot.

“Wait, aren’t you going to unlock the linking chain and the interface chain?” Regeth asked as my vision was reduced to sliding into a long slot. I could just see the horror in Regeth’s eyes and the darkness in Magus’s expression as Magus answered.

“Oops, I must have forgotten about that.” Before locking me in place and throwing me out towards the sun.