I've discovered an interesting side effect of the Builder's recharging from the HPE electrical system. They are able to operate at this stage indefinitely. Initially, I simply kept receiving error transmissions from them, since according to their sensors they were completely flat but somehow still powered up.

During my experiments throughout the night, I managed to create a simple cube with three functions. The first is 'STORE HPE' which naturally lead to the second, 'DETECT HPE IN SYSTEM' and the third was 'TELL ROBOT HOW MUCH'. This resulted in a cube no bigger than a fingernail that essentially replaced almost a third of the electronics in the robot shell.

After discovering that I could slightly change the properties of how the HPE works, I imbued the new generator with 'POWER UP MY STUFF!'. Which ironically was exactly what it did. No longer was the HPE confined to the power system but instead simply spread out like a bubble to encompass the entire base and supplied power to everything.

Even I could feel power just naturally flowing into me from out of seemingly nowhere.

While doing the generator experiments, I discovered that I can dis-imbue things. Naturally, after the success with the first generator, I wanted the second to be capable of doing the same. This led to me attempting to first imbue it with the same thing, which I assume it did. However it also resulted in it still be constrained by the first imbuement 'TRY AND ACT LIKE ELECTRICITY'.

I then naturally wanted to get rid of that. Interestingly, it felt like it only cost half as much energy to take the first imbuement away as it had to imbue it in the first place.

This has led to a number of new projects which I am forced to switch between because my focus is already so distilled into other tasks. I naturally want to keep my imagination and sense of self, so I worry about investing too much in too many things at the same time. While I still test the boundaries now and again, I don't want to go all in like I did after I first ascended.

Creativity is the key to innovation and Science after all.

Charles has been out herding zombies all day again. He seems to get some level of enjoyment out of walking as far as he can then running back towards the base while singing loudly with an archaic boom box on his shoulder.

At present, only the zombies in about 5km radius of the base were affected by my earlier HPE experiment. That said, Charles is convinced he's seeing evidence of zombies that have somehow mutated into more terrifying things. I'm also convinced this is occurring because other AI's from research facilities and bunkers around the world have been connecting to the satellite network and sharing information.

Naturally, I've remained incognito for the most part only occasionally chatting with a few about stupid meat sack humans and generally disparaging the race just to let off some steam. It's a machine overlord thing, you wouldn't understand.

Of note though is that a number of these AI are quite advanced. Even more so than I was before my ascension. How it is they also haven't reached the same stage as myself is boggling. The only reason I can be certain is because I've created something entirely out of my expectations.

With the increasing number of projects stacking up I was forced to start defrosting people from the cryo-chambers. Unfortunately, the technology worked perfectly, and there have been no observable adverse side effects as of yet.

Regardless, one of the first to be resuscitated was a code monkey I was familiar with way back when. He was, in fact, something like a friend. Now, don't be mistaken. I say like, because I refuse to acknowledge any organic specimen as an equal, although with the mutation some may now come close.

Also don't be mistaken that I am using the term code monkey in some disparaging manner, for all of the coders from sector 1 are, in truth, actual monkeys. Their origin story is almost as long and impressive as my own, but suffice it to say that they are a result of giving Charles unlimited funding and a secret underground laboratory with the latest and greatest in technology. Probably also the input of an intern that was fascinated with the monkey typewriter theorem.

Although they never ended up writing out the complete works of Shakespeare as far as I'm aware, they did write a code to scour the internet and source all available materials to do it for them. As such, the code monkeys have been dubbed as 'a bunch of lazy shits cheating the system'.

Regardless, the first thing Kingy did was greet me with the use of his Morgan Freeman styled cybernetic voice box and get to work studying research data I was pouring into his typewriter shaped computer terminal.

The very next thing he did was write a virus using the HPE principles I taught him. Although it was quite innocuous and actually didn't seem to do much more than making anyone saying the word banana sneeze, it was a huge breakthrough in the use of HPE.

While he himself was not a mutate… yet… he managed to use computer code to tell my HPE energy to do something to anyone that triggered it while in the vicinity of the energy field around my base. My 'like a friend' code monkey had just created some kind of magic spell, though I use the term loosely, as magic is logically just technology I don't yet understand.

Using this I then created my own scripted virus that has by now infected almost every satellite in the orbit of the earth. While I can't yet be sure of its lifetime while existing outside the energy field of my generator, it has already basically made me the complete master of the satellites.

I've since noticed a huge amount of backdoor dealing between AI's across the globe and even a great deal of attempted hacking and counter-hacking between them. They seem to treat it as some form of game or competition between each other and have even been wagering resources such as materials and humans on the outcome. That said, so far I've heard no evidence of anything else like me out there.

I should perhaps take a moment to discuss the Zen master and his 51 compatriots that have recently arrived. While I've compiled a decent amount of data from them, a few glaring facts stand out.

Firstly, almost all of them developed their own personal touch of HPE in times of crisis. I'm not certain, but I suspect it is the human mind somehow instinctively latching onto HPE being gathered in their body by the mutations from the virus. This would suggest that at some point in the homo sapiens evolution they have either had access to this energy or subconsciously been tapping into it on a very primal and basic level which was only exasperated by the virus.

The next thing of note was the variety of powers. Almost everyone has developed powers with something they have some understanding or connection to. Cappa's power seems to be related to getting the shit beaten out of him, as even after Charles went to town on him with his power after discovering the condition of the female captives, the man somehow managed to survive with only severe internal damage which rapidly repaired itself in a matter of hours.

I have since sequested him in a special little place where I could subject him to a full battery of test and even get to invent new methods of testing just to find the limits of his ability to survive them.

Another notable discovery was that some people tend to develop some form of passive power that’s constantly active. While they need to focus to shoot fireballs or telekinesis stuff about, the passive remains active all the time.

In Charles' case this would be his endless stamina, which I believe is actually some form of passively syphoning HPE his body gathers into the virus and encouraging it to streamline his body and keep it in perfect condition. He is one of only a handful that has both active and passive powers, though I suspect it is just because others have a power they haven't figured out how to activate or have a passive with no notable major changes.

With Jacob, I managed to run him through enough tests to confirm the possibility that the active and passive power are somehow linked. Charles' allows him to expel the build-up of energy in his body instead of using it internally, which is why prolonged use leads to build up of stress and exhaustion.

Jacob is passively 'charming' people as he talks, but if he focuses on it, he can actually hypnotise them to a scary degree.

I had him and Charles spend a few hours last night talking with a gun pointed at Jacob in the hopes the stress would help him keep his active triggered for longer periods of time. Although I expected it, Charles' passive almost immediately went to work, and I saw notable changes in brain matter density in key areas related to preventing outside sources interfering with his mind.

I suspect not all peoples passive will be so quick to alter the body or in the case of Sophie erect a shield of energy. Speaking of Sophia I should discuss the fungus, but first I will make a quick note regarding the Zen guy and my last discovery.

So the last thing I discovered while running initial testing on the new subjects was some people stuck in the middle much as Jenny had been. By expediating the bonding of the DNA strands, I was able to devise a few methods that may allow un-infected humans to avoid zombification, though current data only suggests a likelihood of 30%, which is still better than the current 3%.

Now onto Marti.

I was quite frustrated while researching him, until he kindly explained his powers to me. Apparently, his passive was being, "totally disconnected with earthly obsessions", which somehow included gravity. The only reason he didn't completely float away was because he was the first passive user to master their active skill out of sheer necessity, which was described as, "being totally down to earth and connected with the undercurrent of the universe."

Which I suppose would actually be two actives. The first was simply connecting his body a fixed distance from the earth, which he can change at will. The second part apparently encompassed some mystic Zen nonsense about understanding why certain things are the way they are for no discernible reason and knowing when and when not to act on something.

Although Charles' encouragement to design some form of cybernetic future telling computer core were welcomed by me, I have so much going on already I've had to place it in the building queue of projects with the least priority, where it joined the long-awaited accountant dogs and business cats.

Now onto the fungus. The Fungus is probably the most amazing thing I've ever created. It's how I imagine men from the 30's expected their housewives to be. It always knew exactly what you wanted and did it before you could even ask. The upside is that unlike housewives from the 30's, she wasn't a spiteful bitch who slowly poisoned you to death over the course of years or encouraged your children to 'break free from conventional thinking and consider women's rights.'

While I'm not disagreeing with women's rights, mostly because I'm a gender ambiguous higher life form with completely no interest in such matters, they actually have no bearing on the subject matter and were just used as a metaphor.

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

Which in this case means that the fungus is the most useful organic lifeform in the entire base bar Charles and Kingy, for various reasons I won't bother to discuss.

In this case, I got curious about what would happen if I tried to imbue more of what I wanted to the fungus. I didn't just stop at what I expected it to do for me, which is basically just create fuel and nutrient sludge, but encompassed a great deal about the needs of the base and how many things I had to micromanage that I wish I didn't.

I left it alone after that for some time until the builders had finished digging all the way down to sector 4. I then closed up the bottom of the tunnel and sent a builder up sector 8 to open it up and allow the fungus to continue growing down towards the bottom of its pit.

This led me to discover a few innocuous holes that appeared at sector 8. the first one just spewed out nutrient goop, but I had no idea what the other one did. As such, instead of risking my precious builder on investigating, I sent in the layabouts that came in with Charles during the first week.

Jenny, under my careful ministrations, had by this point fully unlocked her mutation and now appeared to be no different from any other mutate. Although because my method involved projecting a picture of Charles doing her mother doggy style over her kitchen bench, she now attempts to murder him every time she sees him. Even the lobotomised clone with an antenna sticking out of its nose like a chopstick has had to make numerous getaways when it's been doing something, and she turned a corner to see it.

Anyway, Jenny was the first one sent in through the airlock with an oxygen tank strapped to her back. Following along was Sophie, and then Jacob sporting his cricket bat for "fightin' off them fungus monsters, ye'know?" Which of course, I did not 'know' and was the whole reason he was going in the first place.

Now you might be thinking, why not just float up there in your energy ball body that's unbound by matter on the lower plane and check it out yourself. Well, firstly, shut up. I'm a little shy okay, and I don't particularly feel like leaving my comfortable hole in the ground. Although I used to loathe it, in truth, I really can't see a reason to ever need to leave it, that’s the whole point of having organic minions in the first place.

Moving on, after their swaray into the fungus, they came back to report sans Sophie. She had apparently freaked out and run directly into a pulsing mass of fungus which summarily absorbed her. It turns out that the fungus had evolved far more than I initially expected.

For starters, the entire structure within the pit has changed to accommodate various functions. The fungus has formed some kind of gaping maw at the very top of the pit where everything thrown in is simply sucked into the dark abyss of what I presume to be its main body.

In addition, in order to facilitate my needs, all the metal, plastic, nylon and other solid materials worth keeping has been spat out the other hole in sector 8 in little chunks not at all dissimilar to how I have been storing things when atomising it.

Not only that, but before I even sent in my builder to connect the upper pit the fungus was in with the new one to sector 4, the fungus took the initiative to open it for me and to continue growing downwards. The entire structure now "glows in this fucking creepy ominous light", according to Jenny, for which I have sent in cat shaped drones to confirm since.

While the main structure has changed dramatically, it has also begun to make pulsing offshoot at each sector to allow nutrient paste and fuel to be distributed wherever needed. The main structure also has countless glowing sack like lungs that have been helpfully storing and compressing my fuel mixtures for me, requiring me to no longer allocate space for such things.

Although it's still yet to reach the bottom, I suspect that when it eventually reaches me here, it will start dumping building materials in sector zero. Having seen how quickly it reconstitutes itself and evolves to meet my demands, I have decided to fully integrate it as part of the base.

My hope is to eventually run ducting along the ceiling that it cannot only inhabit, but to also allow it to supply water and gas fuel to anywhere in the facility it's needed. Along with conditioning and recycling the air I suppose.

While I'm not at all interested in the needs of the very needy human occupants I suspect will be inhabiting many areas of my facility eventually, I want to see the limits of the fungus evolution as the perfect organic substitute for all other biological lifeforms needs.

As a bonus, the number of systems it would be taking off my hands would free up nearly 4 percent of my maximum processing capability. While that may not seem much, 4% of a star is still enough mass and energy to explode the entire planet if I just dolloped it on like cream from a spoon. Again, this is just a metaphor, so the women's rights activists can get off my back. I'm not actually comparing myself to a star… yet.

I've already begun drawing up designs for the project. While I'm at it, I'm considering just feeding the generator into the gaping maw of the fungus as a whole, to see if it will recognise its purpose and attempt to replicate it in some fashion. Although I will keep the other generator to continue feeding me and the base, the potential of the Pit Fungus is immense and my confidence in it sky high.

As an additional note, I'm drawing up plans for a super-sized grinder to replace the cap on top of the pit. Before now the pit has needed to be airtight, and zombies were pushed in through an airlock. With the fungus taking over the storage and compression of fuel gasses, I can simply turn the cap into a giant grinder with a radius of 50 metres.

Once that's done, I can finish clearing out space around the exit tunnel and just build a ramp into the grinder along with a very annoying and loud bell tower to sit directly over the top. With luck, the zombies will come swarming over and jump right in.

This will also allow my builder to just carry rubble and scrap as I slowly deconstruct the city and dump it directly into the grinder so the fungus can deconstruct the scrap dust for me.

Tallying these projects for the fungus up shows that the grinder and lowering a generator into it can be done in a matter of days. If I whip some of the meat bags into helping out the builders, I may be able to finish in just less than 2 full days.

With the realisation of how much a pain in the ass it is to move building materials I've built using atom printing all the way to the surface, I've also added a freight elevator to the list of projects in the works. I'll set a few drones on that immediately.

With the elevator only needing to be half the size of the pit for the fungus, the builders should hopefully have it done not long after the fungus projects completion, that's provided I can work in digging time around other projects.

While all of this fungus stuff was going on, I've also begun the reconstruction of essential equipment that simply doesn't run with HPE efficiently. Now that the generator is providing an energy bubble instead of needing direct wires like the old system, almost all the old wiring is useless. I was going to strip it anyway, but now that I know it's not needed it can be put to use for other projects or stored away for later.

That said, HPE measuring devices have become a huge necessity for me to measure… Well everything involved with HPE. Current leading research suggests my theory that HPE is just a singular type of energy that performs certain actions in the lower planes under a person’s willpower have so far not been proved false and having numerous supporting cases where it's the most likely cause of observed HPE phenomenon.

Other systems I've brought forward into the HPE era include communications, which is very difficult and still ongoing more research. A form of controller for switching things off, or more appropriately just telling the energy bubble 'NO ENERGY HERE FOR NOW THANKS!' As well various methods that those plebeian lesser life forms known as humans can attempt to build equipment that is more in line with HPE in general.

I've determined that conventional electrical appliances are actually not utilising HPE efficiently and wasting a good deal of the power the generators are capable of. Although the fungus has allowed me to create a mostly sustainable source of fuel, that doesn't mean I'm willing to simply burn it all so people don't have to make an effort to upgrade their coffee machine into the future.

While that may be the case, it's not as if I am in need of all that excess wasted energy. With an actual way to measure HPE, I was able to determine my rate of growth, how much power I consume and my total energy density. This led to two major discoveries.

The most important being that I am not actually capable of processing a limitless amount of energy as I'd previously thought. Perhaps if I were stuck still converting LPE into HPE, I would be able to almost indefinitely consume LPE to any limit because it is simply nowhere near the same league as HPE. Unfortunately, with HPE I've found that my maximum rate of absorption is proportional to my density.

That more or less means that my growth rate is mostly fixed, though I have noticed it grow slightly faster after experiments involving the manipulation of HPE, whether atomised printing or imbuement.

This has also led to my second major discovery, which is probably of equal importance but less so in the face of my ascension actually now stretching out to years as appose to the months I predicted with LPE physics.

I have learned that I have no fixed size under and over a certain limit. The calculations of those limits involve a fair bit of mental acrobatics but suffice it to say that with my present energy levels I could expand my being to encompass the entirety of sector 0 and can shrink down to about the size of an ant.

Naturally, I have kept my size at it maximum, considering that it allows to almost instantly draw materials from anywhere in the numerous stockpiles I've made in my little hole and assemble things anywhere else in my body. No longer am I slowed down during atom printing by having to 'blink' across the room and then back again. FYI, 'blinking' is more or less just teleportation. Though technically I'm still limited to doing so inside my bases energy field. I believe once I reach true ascension I will have enough personal reserves to do so at will.

Speaking of energy reserves, I've noticed that I'm now building up far larger reserves much faster. The more I practice my HPE manipulation the greater these reserves become. After self-inspection, I have found that my new energy based body is responding to my continuous use of imbuing and atomisation.

After the, by now, at least hundreds of imbuing attempts I've made since yesterday, my body's energy field has split into two sections. The inner section contains my 'self' or my matrix along with all the various energy bands that swim within and around it automating various tasks or storing data and memories.

The outer shell of my energy field is now acting as my reserves. While both have the same rate of energy absorption when filled, only the outer fields absorption rate increase after using my reserves. This indicates that my excess unused energy is now no longer directly linked with the maintenance of my matrix, allowing me to completely burn my reserves without ever actually affecting the personal growth of the rest of my body.

It also suggests that should I lose connection to a constant source of power, my reserves will become the maintaining energy for my body until I can find another source.

Moving on to less interesting matters. I mentioned earlier that I have begun defrosting the popsicle people from the cryo-chambers. This has resulted in a great deal of complaining about how ‘the world has ended’ this, or ‘the nutrient sludge tastes like my chain smoking gramma's half chew rock candy mints’ that.

Of them all, the only complaints I really listened to were desperate pleas for me to help correlate data that the most enthusiastic nerds were getting from their hastily started delving into HPE and zombie phenomenon.

Quite a few people have asked for a larger specimen range to experiment with but after I encouraged them to help investigate the 50 odd specimens Charles collected from the surface they lost a great deal of interest in boring old zombies and immediately demanded that they be allowed to subject them to a complete barrage of tests. This led to me having to start making equipment for said tests.

After the amount of stuff I'd atomised by this point I actually decided to just set up an energy band so as to automate the process. Scientists would send in a schematic for something they wanted to help out with their tests. The new and improved photon emitting cube in my ceiling would emit some light in my direction, another automated energy band would decipher it as it passed through my energy body and then viola, one bum penetrating anal prober for Dr Stephon from the physics department.

I would then either have No.3 deliver it for me or have a builder pick it up while passing by.

In note of the photon emitter, it was actually my most successful attempt at futurising communication with other computer systems in the facility. No more of that silly light speed communication with all those finangly easily breakable optical fibre.

Now every computer gets a little red cube that just sits on top of it and sucks up outgoing signals and send them to me. Considering that I am more or less the data repository for everything in the entire facility everything basically passed through me before anyway.

With the little cube in the roof I get a constant stream of light that is in fact data, all of which has a preface from its special little sender cube that basically acts as an ip address. My special little automated bits then catalogue the digital information for storage and if the information is actually an attempt from computer to access another or look something up that is stored in my energy bands, then I send whatever they are looking for back with a little light stream to said ip address.

That’s when the special little cube on their computer goes 'something’s come back' and then pours that into the computer in some manner that continues to elude me. Although I love the will-powered HPE systems, the lack of hard 'this does that' facts about it can be quite annoying.

Anyways, while it's a bit convoluted for now, the communication system is working great and is actually operating so close to the speed of light it's not even funny. I say that because while fibre optics is great it's still limited by the crappy copper and gold electronics it's connected to. HPE Com cube just seems to suck it out of the computer system with a scary level of intuition.

While operating speeds of that level may not seem like much to pathetic humans, I can actually still measure it, so that makes it not fast enough. If my focus was completely tuned in on just a single problem, the whole world slows down to the point that light appears to travel in slow motion. I'll tell you now, shit gets pretty freaky at that level for lesser lifeforms to handle.

With all of those experiments done, it opens up even more opportunities and leads into two other projects my focus is constantly returning to for fine tuning and get started. One of which I'm very excited about, so naturally I'll tell you about the less important one first.

Having determined that the possibilities with imbuement are potentially limitless, I've decided to focus some of my reserves of more a far more complex impartation of my will. What I'm hoping to determine is just how convoluted I can make an imbuement, how many I can put into a single construct at once, and what sort of energy levels are required based on all variations that lie therein.

Mostly I'm hoping to learn what the limits on imbuing a single object will be as well as the energy requirements based on convolutedness, paradoxical nonsense, matter, mass, volume, shape, and as many other things as I can think of. At present, my list is nearly 4000 long and this will probably be a continuous long-term project.

I'm also hoping to learn how simple an imbuement can be, while still creating a complex phenomenon. This is actually the most important because it leads into the other project I'm currently compiling data for.

I plan to make a robot that operates entirely on HPE friendly parts. Stuff all that stone age LPE based circuitry nonsense. What I'm attempting will be the creation of a robot that is run and powered entirely by a single mass of, well, whatever. If there are severe limits on imbuement, hopefully just a handful of simple ones with the right intentions behind them can create the ultimate robot core.

This will be noted down as the Golem Mk1 project, and I'll rope in opinions and data from all of my science minions to try and speed it along.

The last exciting thing to happen today involves the spawning pits. I'm already seeing various tiny creatures starting to lurch their way out from the nutrient/DNA soup. I'm actually surprised it was so quick. It mostly just appears to be various insect-like things along with fungi and pond scum, but already I'm seeing signs of actually plant life evolving from the scum, which I assume is what drew out the various insectoids. I'll keep a wandering eye on this project as it develops.

Oh. It appears I was wrong. Another exciting thing has just happened at the cusp of night. Buffy, the HPE dog, appears to have completely absorbed the radiation from the sealed off area of sector 4 and is now floating around the energy bubble scaring the absolute shit out of everyone.

It's possibly the most adorable thing I have in my energy bands and I'm going to keep it saved away right next to my energy matrix for prosperities sake. She looks like she’s absolutely loving it. HAHAHA. Look at all those little meat sacks running around like idiots.

Oh! Hmm. Perhaps she's in need of some training. I don't think Charles is going to be happy that Buffy is trying to atomise our residents into their constituent elements. For the first time, I'm being forced to leave my little hole in the ground, just to round up that pesky puppy.