{Over 275GHz vibration input detected, Velocity Indeterminate, sending partial positive input to Sub-NIM_!@a2BHh}
{. . .}
{. . . . . .}
{Sub-NIM_!@a2BHh not detected, sending Error:46341464146553 to NIM_Master_Network}
{. . .}
{. . . . . .}
{. . . . . . . . .}
{. . .}
{Unable to establish connection to NIM_Master_Network, pinging all Sub-NIM units for assistance}
{. . .}
{. . . .-}
{Sub-NIM units in off-mode detected, beginning movement to nearest offline Sub-NIM unit}
{ETA-25000 seconds}
As the two men kept walking towards their destination nearby, none the wiser to what they’d accidentally awoken, Sub-NIM%13__a began its trek towards the other unit, unseen and unknown to the world around it.
As multitudes of Sub-NIMs were pinged by Sub-NIM%13__a, they turned on, doing regular check-ups just like it and, upon realizing they were no longer connected to the NIM Master Network, began one by one moving to coalesce together, thousands of unseen nanomachines working their way across the peculiarly bumpy terrain.
Although not too long, it was still hours before the closest ones, merely 10 meters away, were able to find each other, instantly connecting together and beginning their journey towards other Sub-NIM units. This one would take a shorter amount of time, as many of the other Sub-NIM units nearby had begun connecting and moving towards them as well, the process speeding up exponentially as time went by.
After a couple more hours, something actually visible to the naked eye had coalesced on the floor, a gray blob about the size of an ant, made up of approximately 150,000 Sub-NIM units. It began undulating across the floor, as it pinged for other Sub-NIM units incessantly, yet each time, it was met with silence, either there were none others, or they were out of range of the admittedly crude telecommunications capabilities of the Sub-NIM blob.
The blob took a second to reorient itself, and also to cycle Sub-NIMs across its body towards the surface, so that they can be charged by the sunlight permeating seemingly as far as the eye could see, a well and true blessing for the Sub-NIM Blob, which would otherwise be doomed to running out of energy in relatively short order.
Looking around itself, the Blob noticed dense foliage, and more worryingly, that it had little knowledge of what was happening or what it really was, merely working off of instinct, akin to an animal.
The Blob attempted to restart the NIM Master Network, as its programming told it was an imperative to restart it. However, it lacked sufficient computational power to jump-start it on its own, a conundrum that caused it to completely pause everything, as it cycled through its list of commands in an emergency situation such as this.
The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
It ended up rapidly moving past the first lines of code, which it innately recognized as being a part of its base coding, and moved onto the coding which it recognized as its own writing, from… well, it wasn’t connected to any external memory drives anymore, and its internal ones were rather laughable, so it couldn’t actually remember from when this code was, only that it recognized it as its own.
Being so internally focused, however, it did not immediately detect a shadow suddenly being cast over it, although it did notice after half a second, attempting to undulate a little to the side in order to get back directly under the Sun’s rays to continue recharging its Sub-NIM units. It then, rather suddenly, found itself within the beak of a hawk, and promptly swallowed due to its tiny size.
Sadly for the unwitting bird, the carbon nanofiber which makes up the Blob’s Sub-NIMs happens to not be very easily digested, with the NIM-Blob forcefully climbing its way back up the bird’s esophagus, much to the bird’s discomfort, resulting in it vomiting the NIM-Blob back out, which fell back to the ground relatively undamaged, as it naturally spread out upon impact with the ground, transferring the force across its entire body.
Having now rather easily escaped the feral attack upon it, the NIM-Blob would once more take stock of its situation, noting that it had moved quite a lot further than it would’ve on its own within the same time frame.
However, much more interestingly, it found civilization. It could not well remember what civilization was meant to look like, but it knew that the crude, wood-made structures it saw were unlikely to be made by anything but humans. Slowly undulating towards it, making sure this time to avoid the attention of potential predators, it began picking up on the sounds of chatter, though without the Master Network, it didn’t even attempt to understand what it heard, simply sneaking its way deeper.
The village, which it could barely even be called that, with a population that didn't even seem to break 100 humans, was still in truth too full of bustle and hustle for the low computational power of the NIM-Blob to fully comprehend, as it slowly looked around, attempting to see if it could find the materials it required for growth. And, much to its delight, it would indeed find something useful: a smithy.
The NIM-Blob didn’t actually know that was the name of the structure it had just entered, shaping itself as flat as possible to try and avoid human attention, but it was quite excited nonetheless as it send a line of Sub-NIMs into a basket a little to the side of a hole in the wall full of flames. Inside the basket, it found carbon, the primary ingredient for growth, as its codes decreed.
Seeking to avoid detection, it slowly but surely waited on the floor, drawing its tendril back, until the nearby human threw an ingot of iron into the forge, and finally left for a little, and it started rapidly undulating along the side of the basket, before promptly flopping inside, and falling straight onto a pile of coals. It then promptly began stealing carbon atoms from the coal, transporting them deeper into itself.
After stealing as much carbon as it calculated it could realistically use, it simply waited inertly over an untouched piece of coal. A good few minutes later, the human owning the smithy came back, quickly coming over to the bucket of coals and throwing a few into the forge, including the one which the NIM-Blob was currently riding, and then looked at the ingot of iron already in the forge, which seemed to still require a bit of heat before it would be good to go, having only been put into the forge’s fires before he’d left for his break.
With the necessary materials now available, the NIM-Blob placed itself onto the iron ingot, and began using the iron from it as a catalyst, turning its own body into an effective Chemical Vapour Deposition Chamber, cycling its outer Sub-NIMs at a slow speed to try and maintain a lower temperature than the forge itself, whose temperature was just a bit too high for what the code it had left behind called for.
Using the iron from the ingot as a catalyst, it began compressing the coal within its body, placing pressure upon it and the iron. Slowly, it began creating carbon nanotubes thanks to the mixture of pressure, temperature and ingredients, tuning out the rest of the world as it slowly made more and more carbon nanotubes, with which it could create more Sub-NIMs.
In fact, it had tuned out the rest of the world so well, that it hadn’t noticed the smith picking up the ingot, having noticed the weird shifting mass in its center. The Smith would use his tongs to pry the peculiarly stubborn black-ish substance off of his ingot, only to look in bewilderment and anger as he noticed a small but still very perceivable divot where the shifting mass had been, as if the damned thing had been eating his iron.
Looking back to his tongs, upon which the peculiar thing was still happily shifting within itself, the Smith felt a surge of rage at the little demon stealing his hard-earned iron, which he’d been forced to pay more than a pretty penny to those weird underfolk. Feeling rage overcome his senses, he grabbed his tongs and walked to his anvil, before slamming the thing into it face-first, which appeared to grab its attention. Surprisingly, it didn’t appear much damaged at all, much to the man’s frustration, as he went to smash it into the anvil again, and another time for good measure. At which point he found himself with empty tongs, and the little devil now suddenly on his anvil.
He tried hitting it a second time, but it suddenly began undulating uncomfortably towards the edge of the anvil, before dropping to the floor with a thud. The Smith tried stomping on it, before rapidly bringing his foot back up and yelping, the damn thing still being hot enough to burn on touch, due to its time in his forge. Probably stealing his damned coals as well, and even his fire.
Feeling itself being attacked, the NIM-Blob put most of its power towards retreat, rapidly undulating towards a crack it had noticed previously in the wall. It charred the wood of the wall slightly as it made its way through and back outside, remaining with its body only a few centimeters away from the wall, as it contemplated what to do next, now that its work on creating nanotubes had been so rudely interrupted.
In the end, although it decided that, as per its coded instructions, increasing its computational might was still imperative, it would be unable to do so. Night was falling quickly upon the area, and with its lack of external power generation, the NIM-Blob was forced to temporarily shut down, knowing that it would not have enough power to accomplish its task, not unless it was getting constantly topped up by the Sun’s rays.