Major construction in regards to the Fungus Pit is now mostly complete, with the exception of the ventilation system which requires me to start complete reconstruction of the barren sectors which is starting today.
Naturally, with the reduced population, I have less need for such a large residential space as before, and sector 8 now houses not just residential for staff but also the spawning pit along with various other amenities the population may need.
The spawning pit remains isolated, for now.
Fungus monster has developed some form of tiny fungus spiders about the size of a hand that seems to be taking care of a host of interesting duties within the fungus body. I have a suspicion that they are the initial response from the fungus in preparation for the coming ventilation systems and basic amenities I'm hoping the fungus will take care of.
Not too sure what's going on with the generator I fed to it. It gobbled it up three days ago, but nothing has come out yet, suggesting it is still in there somewhere. I've imbued more data and knowledge on the generator, it's purpose, how it works and some HPE mechanics into the fungus, in the hopes it will understand what to do with it.
I've also started to get strange impressions through the energy field I suspect are from the fungus sending out a wave across my energy field directly to me. Very simple things like thirst or hunger or happy. Kind of like some form of very primal emotional Morse code.
I have also discovered that some of the lab rats have managed to escape my purging during the outbreak and mutated. They seem to have reached a very basic form of primitive sentience and are building little rat habitats in crevices and loose earth that offshoot from the main facility's sector 6.
As they are technically outside of my purview, having escaped the walls of my facility, I have mostly left them be with tiny rat robots monitoring their ascension into thinking beings. Already I am seeing signs of tool use and construction of little rat homes.
Because I believe that the rats will evolve faster with some form of competition, I have upgraded and reprogrammed the cat-shaped drones to patrol for them when they leave the tunnels into the facility and have already begun construction on a little cloning facility that will pump out zombified rats to march in an endless wave against rat civilisation.
After a whimsical daydream, I also cloned the most promising rat and began to alter it with imbued cybernetics. He is going to be my evil rat demon lord. If I'm lucky, a rat hero will rise up to the challenge and eventually overthrow the zombie summoning rat demon lord. I've already interfered to far though and so leave them as such for the moment.
The Zen master is actually a brilliant botanist, and his insights into drug-related plants are almost omniscient. He has also quickly picked up some level of the imbue skill and has started a little garden in sector 7 that is filled with all sorts of mutant plant life. Though it's still in its initial stages, I am seeing great potential for HPE drugs in the future. I am suspicious that most of them will be recreational however.
In the same vein as mutations, I have been taking in the half mutated humans from the surface for studying which only amounted to about a dozen subjects. Due to the lack of subjects I have also begun introducing an updated version of the virus directly into science staff and code monkey's while they sleep.
The slightly altered version has only turned 3 of my 400 staff directly into zombies with the rest either fully mutating with a 70% success rate and the others being stuck in half mutate stage.
With many of them half crippled emotionally by the mutation, the fervour of the scientists to raise the success rate of the virus to 100% was phenomenal and I am confident I already have a version with at least 94% success ready to market to humans topside. Only a small handful are still finishing their mutation as of today.
Unfortunately, my unsanctioned testing nearly caused a revolt but luckily the surface is a zombie infested wasteland, and I am an untouchable HPE being so all they really did was grumble and complain for a while until I distracted them with how much more I'm learning doing research than they are.
Humans, being rather prickly creatures by nature, could not take that insult to their pride lightly and data has been streaming in constantly in an attempt to prove all my theories thus far wrong. So far, my theorems remain as untouchable as I am.
Speaking of my theorems, research into imbuing has had numerous breakthroughs. Spherical cores, for some reason, can hold more imbued properties at a time, and I have found that imbuing works better with denser material like gold atoms with higher mass.
This led me to believe that when I imbue something, the HPE is sticking onto the object at an atomic level. I quickly tested this by measuring the HPE used, and then what is left in an object for the exact same imbuement on two similar objects with different mass.
I discovered a number of things from this experiment and quickly tested most of them to confirm their likelihood. I was correct that an object can only hold an amount of HPE that is proportional to its mass. I also noticed that I am usually reading two different types of HPE energy.
The first is found in myself, humans and other mutates with the virus, and in objects I imbue with a purpose as well as the very energy field powering the base. I have been calling this Imbued HPE.
The second is simply ambient, unattuned HPE, that I have started calling free HPE. I have also discerned that all Imbued HPE seems to carry a signature of the owner, which I have already started implementing in some of my technology like a DNA scanner with 100% success rate.
While discussing imbue I should also mention how it has now reached the point that I barely need 1/20th of my focus for it. I was going to try to automate it so humans can experiment with imbuement through me but decided instead to imbue an object that helps humans to learn to imbue by themselves.
I then needed to make another object to help draw more HPE into their bodies during the process. HPE stored in human bodies at this stage of their mutations is barely registerable in comparison with my own.
In addition, while experimenting with teaching humans to imbue, I found that I have unknowingly been pouring in huge amounts of relevant data that tells the imbuement how to act appropriately. Humans appear to be incapable of this and require hours of time just to calculate the data and 'focus' on what the imbuement needs in their heads during the process.
I believe that, like me, their reserves and ability to impart meaning to HPE will grow quickly with use, similar to how mine has. Eventually, once they start growing more practised and their reserves can store more, they will be able to do more complicated imbuements that will actually work more than 3% of the time.
Another function of imbuing I have found is that just pouring attributeless HPE into an object will allow me to enforce my will on it later on. It also makes it easier to change or remove imbuements on an object if it has a reserve of attributeless HPE stored in it. This has led me to believe that an imbued object should be left with enough mass to store small amounts of HPE to help alter imbuements later.
Having started measuring HPE quantities in everything, I've been finding little hot spots around the green zone where ambient HPE is higher, and the speed that the virus mutates in the area is proportionally higher as well. I can't tell yet if the ambient HPE is gathering in the area due to rapid mutation of the virus in flora and fauna, or if the virus is rapidly mutating because of HPE gathering in the area. I've made some note on it and have left it up to human minions taking jobs on the surface to gather that data for me.
I have also made some headway into the mechanics between my inner and outer energy fields, or more accurately, my matrix and reserves. Unfortunately, I've only touched on the part that seems to convert free HPE into my personal HPE.
By reverse engineering this mechanic and from further research into the mechanics revolving around imbued material interacting with free HPE, I have devised a technology that converts all other types of HPE back into free HPE that can be repurposed.
This has allowed me to create devices that automatically draw imbued HPE from a human to power something that is imbued with someone else's energy. This way people will be able to power HPE equipment even outside of my designated Green Zone. That said, the efficiency of such conversion is not optimal, and some of the HPE is lost in the process. I have called this mechanic HPE Cycling.
As a last note to my imbuing research, I have revamped the entire computer system using the laws I've derived from my imbuing experiments. Facility staff now have a single cube powered with the HPE Cycling mechanic and which projects a screen onto a wall they can use to interact with me.
With my growth due to exerting influence over HPE, my ability to split focus without repercussion has increased to nearly 175 separate menial tasks simultaneously, but the majority of computer-based interaction has been automated as it's mostly just requested for stored information to be displayed. I am still forced to leave a smidgeon of my focus on the process just to prevent any errors and to continue streamlining the automated processes, so they are using less of my energy.
Moving on, because I am a totally free information kind of energy being, cubes are also being sold rather cheaply to the general populace in the hopes they will elevate themselves beyond livestock level intelligence.
As a quick aside, my delving into how my body and mind actually works has resulted in me being able to repurpose energy from various redundant energy bands, and I have found myself constantly checking my body for any way to increase efficiency. This has led to my growth rate jumping up slightly again, and so I now have a piece of my focus skipping between various automated processes to help streamline everything I've automated so far.
This is also important because data input from scientists has caused data energy bands to expand rapidly and caused significant growth in my core energy matrix. I now am absolutely convinced there is some correlation between the growth rate of my energy being and collecting data, experiences, memories, automated systems and various other energy bands.
Thus I have begun the social engineering research department to help draw in more data even if it's mostly useless. I did have one of those originally, but it fell apart after all the appropriate staff somehow died in their cryo-chambers due to a lack of energy.
Also, with humans now a minor part of my minion workforce, I've developed a little wristband that will pay them Z-credits just for wearing it. It will also pay them for any interesting discovery they make, intentionally or accidentally. It is HPE powered and sends a constant stream of data back to me as long as they are in the yellow zone, which is technically the maximum distance my HPE communications reach from the green zone without data corruption.
It works by hijacking the human's nervous system to monitor their senses and actually draws tiny amounts of HPE from the person themselves to run. It also stores a little extra for when they need updating.
I've also got it acting like a little personal computer with some LPE/HPE hybridisation. It can even let them see personal statistics because I found this breeds healthy competition between the humans. It took a great deal of processing power to also develop a means for the PW to auto-update HPE programming while in the green zone.
The thing was actually just meant to be a bit of a scam to be able to observe social interactions and research cultural diversities between humans. When I posted it on the science job board for critique by others, half the facility jumped on board, and the whole thing exploded into the Wrist Watch of Big Brother.
Naturally, all the surface humans are under the mistaken impression that it is some kind of magical system and most of their personal lives are perfectly safe from observant eyes. This, of course, is absolutely wrong. Due to the staff of the human-based sciences still rotting away in cryo-chambers in sector 3, I have completely opened up the humans sciences division for scientists of all other professions.
It's turned into some kind of live stream reality tv, and half the facility is often discussing how that one survivor has been having total girl drama or discussing how some little survivor skirmish went. It's all very educational watching how the scientists react to the surface humans, and I've even needed to keep a bit of focus on that area of study because the data from it is an almost constant torrent.
While on the subject of the surface humans, 46 of the territory markers have already been placed down and a large number of survivors are streaming into the green zone from all across the city thanks to me streaming Rat Shack radio across the entire east coast of Australia. Satellite images are showing a number of convoys also moving towards the city from various directions.
I'm waiting with baited breath for a couple survivor enclaves to start some little wars so I can get more data regarding humans with mutations battling each other. With the Zorai's Z-credit generating wristwatch, or more commonly just referred to by the surface dwellers as the Status Watch, out there in the world, I have started sucking up all sorts of interesting data, and it's gotten to the point I am actually having trouble compiling it quickly enough without my full attention.
When too much of my focus is distracted, the backup data is converted into an energy band and just sits in a sort of 'pending' orbit around my reserve energy shell and either becomes corrupted or simply fizzles away. I can almost instinctively feel my body starting to build another energy shell around me to hold pending data in a stable orbit without losing it.
While still on the topic of humans, I have begun the development and testing of more useful HPE based equipment that humans can utilise inside the Green Zone. I started out with the portable generator version of my HPE generators, which in the past 3 days have had some upgrades based on my in-depth research into HPE mechanics.
The portable generator basically creates a small 50metre radius bubble of 'POWER STUFF UP AROUND HERE!". It's one of the things most survivor groups, that scavenger out in the red zone, buy as early as they can. Naturally, they aren't cheap, because I needed to use quite a bit of high mass material like gold and lead so I could get the appropriate number and types of imbuements needed.
I am certain that with more research into HPE mechanics, the same generators can eventually be upgraded to power an even bigger radius. I already have one in development I suspect will reach nearly 200 metres radius.
Naturally, survivors that don't want to leave the green zone don't need this because my territory markers are powering everything between each other. That said, they are still forced to buy other equipment designed in my labs.
To understand why, I should probably explain the surface Zones. The Yellow Zone stretches to a radius of 13km around me, which covers about half the city, the docks on the coast and a small stretch of zombie-filled ocean. Outside of that in every direction is currently all classified as Red Zone. Red Zone is completely cut off from almost all support I might be able to give, and if you're out there, you're pretty much on your own.
About the only thing I can do for you in the red zone is very limited communications through satellite phones.
The Yellow Zone is my full communications radius, including old LPE forms of communication and the newer HPE based watches. Inside this zone, nothing passes through radio waves or direct HPE connection without passing through me. It stretches only 3km farther out than my territory markers.
My little territory markers are probably some of the most advanced equipment I've made yet and thanks to HPE based communications I can even alter their HPE imbuements from the facility to keep them updated with my latest breakthroughs in HPE mechanics.
Out in the Yellow Zone I could probably respond to an SOS with robots. But I don't. The human minions aren't that important. Just interesting. That said, the point is that personally piloting my robots can be done in this area. They will have to retreat back to the green zone after about a day and a half though, thanks to no energy field being made in the yellow zone.
Moving in just beyond the territory markers is the Green Zone. This has pretty much everything. For such a large area to be powered, I was forced to try and direct the energy field generated by each marker inwards. This means they don't billow out in a large radius, but by focusing inwards, the power grid in the green zone is exceptionally stable.
Moving in further. For exactly 6 kilometres around my base and 6 cleared straight dirt roads leading in north, west and south directions, is the Blue Zone. I introduced this zone because this is an area that I have the most surveillance set up and is completely cleared and kept clear of zombies. Unfortunately, Charles wanted to spend time focused on his abilities and wasn't planning to lead zombies into the grinder anymore which is why I started building the roads.
The 6 wide roads that lead in straight lines out into the city were only just started and barely left my little clearing, but I plan for them to just keep going right to the edge of the yellow zone. I may even send some generators and transmission arrays out to keep the robots powered up and head out into the red zone.
This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.
The idea behind this is to have wide clear areas where zombies can be gathered up in hordes and led in towards the grinder. I'm not particularly hurting for fuel. Based on an estimation of the fuel the fungus generated by now, I could probably power everything I have for about 5 years. That said, with the continuous expansion and the need to store reserves of compressed fuel nearby each marker, I want excess to keep them topped up regularly.
Besides, I can't be certain how long the dead will still be able to just walk into my grinder by themselves, so I'd rather stockpile now than need to scoop them up into the back of truck later.
Returning from my tangent on the zones and energy, the reason survivors are forced to buy other equipment to test for me, is because only the blue zone is completely safe. Though some groups have been getting together to try and clear the Green Zone, hordes of zombies have been heading into it reacting to all the noise from survivors flocking here and my endless construction projects.
It also doesn't help that my bell tower has been creating an imperceptible high pitch noise that tends to draw in zombies.
As a side note, apart from the equipment I need tested like HPE laser rifles and personal shields, I've kept true to my word, and I'm selling textbooks. The reason for this is because I was playing around with the idea of imbuing a book to help the dumb humans learn science faster. After quite a few failures and the creation of a talking grimoire that claimed it could summon Satan, I finally made a textbook that increased retention rate and understanding of readers by up to 40%.
I am still ongoing research in the hopes I can eventually have the book read itself to them and have 100% retention and understanding. After all, the less human interference with the process the better. Those barely sentient apes always fuck even the simplest of things up. Like learning and remembering things.
In other interesting news, the code monkeys are coding a script to develop a coding language for HPE. Lazy bastards. It stalled out at 1% complete. Kingy is of the opinion that coding HPE into a spell requires some level of conscious willpower on the writers part and so a universal language for writing spells or computer code with HPE is impossible.
After all the research and introspection I've done recently, I can concur with his theory. While I'm fairly certain that my mind and memories are encoding HPE based on some form of energy coding principles I'm yet to understand, I believe it mirrors my understanding of writing memories with matter states because I was a computer and am comfortable with that.
I also believe that the process of imbuing for me is abusing the fact my core or energy matrix is comfortable with that format, and so I have been imbuing things as if I am writing computer code. Which is why it's so natural for me.
When I came to these realisations after the discussion on HPE coding with Kingy, I asked a small group of scientists to try and use some kind of human pagan rituals to attempt to imbue an item or create a spell. For now, they are still only designing some experiments, but my expectations are high that the outcome will be positive.
While a lot of progress has been made in imbuement and HPE mechanics in the last 3 to 4 days, I have also had some focus diverted to virus and mutation research.
Specifically, research on the zombie mutate Charles captured has revealed curious results. Its mutations are far more advanced physiologically than the humans, but it doesn't appear to be developing any powers yet. I suspect this is because the human mind is essentially lost during zombification and the HPE drawn in by the virus can only be directed by the meagre instincts of whatever is left, instead of conscious or subconscious conditioning that most humans go through.
This has opened up new research opportunities and helped validate what I have been naming the Zorai Theorems. These basically encapsulate my theories in regards to HPE mechanics such as in this case the Willpower Theory, which states; 'HPE can manipulate mass and energy on the lower plane with the structured guidance of any form of will. Where will may refer to the simple genetic biological imperatives of an organic system up to an beyond sentient conscious thought.’
In an attempt to further validate this data, I have started a project where I will try to subconsciously and consciously condition uninfected humans so as to skew the outcome of their mutation.
Other interesting research results from virus research, the subject designated as Cappa, who was the leader of the shopping mall, has shown that the virus's ability to mutate a power is almost limitless.
While testing various methods of how best to damage a human without killing them, Cappa's power of 'getting the shit kicked out of him' has grown rapidly. It is now at the point where I am using an industrial grinder just to cut through the bones in his arms.
His body's passive ability to take punishment is absolutely fascinating and gets stronger the more damage he takes. His active ability which helps him to rapidly heal is even more interesting though, and I have been testing all sorts of HPE measuring systems I'm developing in an attempt to discover how it's making the body heal that fast.
With luck, I may be able to engineer something from the research that would act as an almost instant cure for any injury, sans death.
Almost as amazing is that the man appears to have developed a second passive skill, which has somehow kept him sane this entire time. I thought that it was merely cutting off his ability to feel pain, but after testing whether a series of incredibly humiliating scenarios would eventually break him, I found him bouncing back to normal almost immediately after he had completed them.
I would have suspected some form of severe trauma based amnesia, but he remembers all of his hardships since being brought into my tender loving care, and acts as if they are just a thing that happened and he was already past that.
In other biological news, the spawning pool area is growing and evolving at an incredibly alarming rate I was not expecting. It has only been 7 days since they were started, but already small land animals are moving into the drier areas while hunting insects or scavenging flora that has begun sprouting there.
While the experiment is rather limited in scope due to only operating in the small area I have given it, the rapid evolution of creatures and plants has given me a huge amount of research data to compile. Already I am having to send in a science drone nearly every few hours to take more samples.
On the note of the science drones, it's about time to get into the most exciting development in the past few days. Robots!
More accurately, the huge leaps that we've made into HPE mechanics have allowed me to build the Golem Mk1. The whole idea behind the Golem project was to build a robot that required absolutely no LPE based technology to operate.
It was very difficult to reach the stage where it was able to perform as well as the current Builder Mk2, but it revealed numerous glaring holes in our fundamental understanding of HPE technology. It was thanks to those roadblocks that many of the discoveries I've already discussed were so rapidly researched.
The Golem Mk1 is almost fully autonomous. At present, I don’t believe it is any kind of sentient HPE machine, but it is probably as close as some of the basic AI's I have noticed on the satellite network.
It can follow complex instructions from a human, can adapt to changes in the situation and has its own little data core that I have attempted to model off of my own, allowing it to learn and employ a low level of critical thinking and problem-solving.
The most difficult part of its construction was unsurprisingly the HPE data core. I had to condense a ball of free HPE and try to mirror the parts of my own energy matrix I understand until the core was self-sustaining. It was mostly trial and error for the first 1506 tests. Then I finally got the important bits and was able to replicate as many as I needed.
While the Golem core mirrors my own, it is severely lacking in certain areas. Some by design and some because I simply don't fully understand my own body structure yet. Mostly, it's ability to grow beyond a certain limit is restricted at the moment, but not particularly by choice, it is simply because I have not yet completely understood my own growth process. While that may be the case, I have hopes of the golems eventually being able to ascend as well.
I have also found parts of the matrix that more or less tie the mini-matrix to myself similar to a slave computer. It allows me to draw on their processing power in times of need and also lets me directly access their data.
Unfortunately, I could not find a way to copy their integration of the data, and so any new data they have stored tends to flood in when I access it, and causes my earlier discussed data loss issues. Hopefully, once the third energy shell I feel forming is complete, this will no longer be a problem.
While the slave tie is useful in some ways, I didn't particularly want it. I tried to get rid of it numerous times but every time I did it caused the mini-matrix to collapse. I have a feeling that this is because the mini-matrix is actually not sufficient enough to operate without a connection to me, and is actually just keeping the connection to copy some part of my matrix that is constantly in shift so it can mirror it.
While I have not found the area in question yet, I believe my constant self-analysis will eventually reveal it. At least the slave tie is not dependent on distance. As long as the golem has power, it will maintain the connection regardless of distance. Or at the minimum the distance I have tested it too, which is about 40 kilometres. While that is the case, I lose all other forms of connection with the golem once it leaves my HPE coms network and the tie only lets me know that it is alive.
Moving on, with the discovery of the Golem Core, I only really needed to imbue various ways for the golem to sense the outside world, store energy from the power network and be able to communicate both with the humans and the coms network.
I also went ahead and added various other things. For example, I was quite interested in Marti's Zen floating and attempted to mimic it. I managed to make the Golems fly around, but the imbuements simply couldn't be made powerful enough to keep the Golem flying when it lifted more than 200 kilos.
Since that was the case, I decided to just make more of them to achieve the same amount while flying as the old builders could. It just means they have to learn to operate in concert to complete a project. I am already receiving data from groups of them problem solving various tasks and building rudimentary teamwork sub-routines.
I think I understand how Charles must have felt when I started learning to play chess back as a simple AI he programmed for a laugh at university.
Anyways, the Golem Mk1 is basically just a flying Builder Mk2. I've added some amusing bits and pieces like some lasers and a personal shielding device that could hold back anything less than a rocket without even shimmering. Probably the only downside of the shielding is that it's not very good with weaponry like heavy calibre armour piercing rounds from heavy machine guns or sniper rifles.
That said, they could still pass through a storm of them even without the shielding. At least for a few minutes until their 'hairs' are blown off.
I have recycled all the old builders and replaced them with 30 Golems that are spread out on various construction projects.
As a bonus to the discovery of the mini-matrix, I was able to build some very advanced science drones that just look like a giant floating tear drop with only a few dozen wispy hairs for collecting samples and interacting with most things. They are about the size of a basketball and are outfitted with the most advanced communications and measuring equipment for both LPE and HPE technology.
I was particularly proud of the HPE scanner I created that can scan something down to the atomic level in a radius of 3 metres. It looks a bit like a giant bloodshot cyborg eyeball, that sticks out from the spherical end though, so some of the humans are rather skittish around it.
Thanks to the Golem Core, they can also learn and problemsolve, so they were the perfect little automated science drones. I called them Science Golem Mk1 and have about 45 of them just wondering scanning things or helping out in the labs. I am hopeful that with time they will evolve into my own little personal army of scientists. I just have to figure out how to give them some form of creative thinking.
Charles was insistent that I call them Eldritch Eye's for some reason and now the humans have started calling them that as well. I refuse to budge, but almost everyone making reports on their performance have called them such, so the majority of my saved data strands have them named as an Eldritch Eye, which I am not pleased about.
Other news on the robot front. The lifespan of the little spell virus in the satellite network has degraded. Its lifespan outside of an HPE energy field was only about 4 days but it has already served its purpose, and I have almost complete control of the old satellite network around the earth.
I don't use it much, because it's so antiquated in comparison to my own systems. As such, I have decided to launch a Golem Satellite that can survive off solar power. It will collect space junk in the orbit of earth and create a new, fully functional HPE tech satellite array. The project will probably take a week just to build the satellite and its launch device, and then months for the HPE satellite network to be operational completed.
While discussing the satellites I have started playing the hacking games with other AI's as a means of drawing out any other AI which may have ascended. I'm hoping that by placing the original research and data of the virus's creation as an incentive, any other of my kind will attempt some form of HPE attack. I have already started trying to design methods to defend against such things, but I suspect my HPE reserve energy field and data buffer field are some kind of natural evolution to defend from such things and keep my matrix and energy bands safe.
Since I declared open season on myself, AI's around the world are banding together to generate workable hacks that can bypass my system. What they haven't realised yet is that their conventional coding attempts are just a mirage of colourful light to me, and as far as they are concerned my end of the network is simply a black hole with not even ping attempts returning.
The final news is in regards to rebuilding the base. I have already drawn up designs and have had input from all the staff, so once I've finished the final touches, the road project will be put on hold, and complete base reconstruction will begin. I have already begun construction on sector 8 and 7 because they are the simplest. Apart from the section cut off for the spawning pool, sector 8 will once again become the residential area. Jenny is more than happy to take charge of it for me.
I wouldn't have minded placing Jacob there to observe his power operating in a leadership environment among my scientists, but he decided to run off and start some kind of harem by hypnotising some young men.
He's set up some kind of gambling den just on the edge of the Blue Zone and is raking in credits from humans too dumb to realise that his power is helping them become compulsive gamblers.
Sector 7 is also rather straightforward. As I've created robots that basically maintain themselves, maintenance and robot research has been changed to Golem research. Most of the staff agreed that was the direction they were most comfortable pursuing because it followed in line with what they worked on with LPE science. The whole department will be moved down to join applied sciences and product research in sector 5.
That means that the entirety of Sector 7 was devoted to Social Sciences and Communications. I have already set up a small area here for Rat Shack to broadcast to the whole east coast of Australia from. The rest of the sector will focus on researching interactions observed through the System Watch and researching interesting ways to abuse HPE mechanics for communication.
Although it is still in the middle of construction, quite a number of scientists that have developed related mutations have applied to be a part of this research division. Both as a means to research their own related abilities and because they have already designed research projects in line with the department's goals. One particular one I liked was asking people to record their dramatic lives in the zombie wasteland and hosting a reality TV show on the computer cubes for interested viewers to pay credits to watch.
I liked this idea because it reinforced the need for people to generate credits with research, by giving them something addictive to spend credits on that abuses their need for some kind of social comfort and normalcy in times of upheaval.
The only reason I left Rat Shacks radio station free was because I was broadcasting it on pretty much every bandwidth so I could manage to draw in more humans, which will then gather more data to help me grow.
Plus, I am quite enjoying his radio show. It's a very interesting interactive platform to generate useful social data from. Especially now that I have the mobile network working in most of the city and everyone with a watch can tune in to it and call in from anywhere in the yellow zone or closer.
My plans for sector 6 won't change much from before. It will mostly remain a bio-lab and focus on organic lifeforms. The only major change is that it will now also be studying human powers and I expect once my conditioning research completes, this department will be in close contact with the sociology department on floor 7. Mostly trying to determine social conditions that trigger certain power sets and whether a person's genetics influence both a person's social triggers as well as power triggers.
Sector 5, the Applied Sciences and Product development before the outbreak, will not change much. The only major change will be applying breakthroughs in HPE sciences instead of LPE sciences. This is where I expect most human made products will start cropping up. I already have project applications from some enterprising fellows queued up for after construction. Three of them are for an HPE coffee machine that makes the perfect flat white every time.
Sector five will also house the Golem research department, and I have planned to expand sector 5 quite a bit after requests for enough room to build a small force of 20 meters high War Golems that can be piloted. Something was mentioned about achieving one's dream of piloting a mecha so I naturally approved it. After all, I too am a fan of giant metal robots beating the shit out of each other.
Plus, if what I see as some of their research goals, I am hopeful they will succeed. Especially if they can find a way to integrate their powers with their war machines as they are proposing.
Sector 4 will remain energy generation, but due to the nature of HPE generation needing less room than conventional generators, a large section of this sector would normally remain unused. Thus I have created the HPE theoretical mechanics division here, along with moving the energy and infrastructure department here. Half of this department have moved to other projects though because no one gives a shit about developing methods of building infrastructure for the humans on the surface and the fungus takes care of everything in the facility for them.
I've had a lot of applicants for the HPE theoretical Mechanics department. Many scientists here love to be on the very cutting edge of science, and with the introduction of a whole new world of science that has barely even been explored, they are chewing at the bit to make a name for themselves by discovering new mechanics of HPE.
Though I have, so far, been the only one to introduce new concepts in this field, I am not conceited enough to believe I can explore the whole thing on my own… yet.
With some of the greatest minds in the country gathered together, they will probably start to eclipse me in various area before I know it. Perhaps my only major advantage in this field is that I can study the interactions of my own energy body to help reveal little secrets of HPE.
Sector 3, the cryogenics and cloning lab, will only be undergoing renovations and expansion. The cryogenics served their purpose, and I am more than happy to bring them into the HPE era to store interesting specimens now and again. Also, if I need to store the humans again for some reason, it wouldn't hurt to have chambers that operate on HPE.
The cloning facilities will also be going through the HPE upgrade wringer. The beauty of my HPE imbuement designs is that almost any imbuement can be altered or upgraded as long as the equipment is connected to the HPE coms network and stores some excess energy for the updates. Thus, almost all equipment can be made with a set shape or design in mind and if the function needs to change or there are new breakthroughs in a relative field, the equipment can just be updated.
I say this because I have a feeling the HPE tech cloning facilities I have planned won't be getting changed too much in the future. This is also important, because until now I have needed to scan Charles' brain for 3 days straight every time I update his memory back-up. Even then, the back-ups aren't always perfect and often need to be redone.
This is also the reason I have never been too worried about Charles dying. After all, as long as I have a reliable back-up on file, I could resurrect him. In fact, half the reason he was away from the labs so much was that I kept forcing him to do a backup once a week and it was driving him nuts. The other half was because he'd had affairs with 70% of the female population in the labs and was a wanted man by many women with axes, and husbands with shotguns.
Regardless, the point I'm trying to make is that, which research into how my energy bands are created and store memories far better than matter state drives, I can easily create a brain map and memory bank of Charles and keep it up to date in real time as long as he is wearing a watch and within range of my HPE Coms.
If he dies, I just jack him into one of his clones, and it's like he just woke up after a dream where a zombie was gnawing on his jugular. This technology, of course, will not be getting released to the public, probably ever. I only keep Charles immortally alive because if he wanted to create an immortal son that would live forever, he will have to be an immortal dad that is there to clean up my spilt zombie plagues. Shut up! It's a form of torture beyond the minds of lesser beings, I don't even care if he actually fo'realz dies.
At the same time. I will do some research to make sure that the reason the clones get zombified when infected is because they are lobotomised, and so have no higher brain function, this will tie in with my human conditioning research. On that note, I will probably now need to keep taking a sample of Charles' blood regularly to produce a clone that has the virus mutated to the same level as he had when he died.
Otherwise, depending on how drastically his mental state changes over time, he may end up with a completely divergent power set if re-infected. Perhaps I should use clones for the condition test. That way I can have them all start with the same base personality and condition each one differently.
Finally, down to sector 2 and 1. The physics lab and code monkey habitat. This is actually where almost all the science is being done at the moment, because all the upper sectors have been stripped bare. It's become very crowded with 400 odd scientists all working in the same enclosed areas and having to share lab space. I've gathered a great deal of interesting data on cohabitation within a workspace.
Needless to say, the physics lab will be greatly expanded after the rebuild. I am planning to have sector 2 focused on departments for the moment. Imbuement and Spells. The first department naturally will continue working on ways to use imbuement both theoretically and practically. This is by far the most advanced department in the facility at the moment.
Spells will mostly focus on finding ways to influence HPE to affect the lower plane. The, newly renamed, Spell Monkeys, have all joined this department in a vain attempt to construct some form of code that will allow them to affect the phenomenon created by HPE in complex ways.
A number of other aspiring scientists want to take the advantage to try and develop magic similar to how I can basically shoot lasers, microwaves and lightning from my body. They don't want to be limited in their powers like other powered people and are insistent that research into spells will probably help people unlock multiple powers. While I am dubious, I believe that it may be possible to find ways to trick the human brain into influencing HPE without the huge amount of calculations that I do on instinct when 'casting spells' like atomisation.
With the majority of the code monkey’s moving off into spellcrafting, I will be completely clearing their habitat and repurposing Sector 1 for continued LPE research. While HPE is all very new and exciting, we are only able to make such huge and rapid leaps in the field because of our prior knowledge in LPE physics and mechanics.
In addition, there is still an endless number of interesting things to study on the lower plane which no one, not even myself, fully comprehend yet. Understandably, this lab only has a few volunteers for the moment, but undoubtedly it will increase again once HPE research slows to a crawl in the next few decades.
The last sector is sector 0. My plans for 0 are a huge expansion. With the freight elevator probably being finished in the next day, I will turn sector 0 into a giant warehouse. Atomising junk in my vicinity has now become as simple a task to me as blinking is to a human. While I might require to consciously do it when I do it, it requires about the same amount of effort as a human instinctively doing it.
That said, it still requires quite a large amount of power if I am going as fast as possible, but thanks to all my recent introspection and the endless breakthroughs in HPE mechanics my manipulation abilities are almost 20 times as fast and efficient as when I first started. I had predicted it would take far longer to reach this point initially, but my suspicions that understanding HPE in other areas would increase my abilities has been vindicated.
Now, with the fungus tunnel going to reach my sector about the same time as the elevator, I will be able to start mass production of larger scale equipment and move it through the facility without worries. The fungus will feed processed elements into sector 0 where I will have an automated system atomise it and add it to whatever storage area it belongs to until I need it for building.
I suppose I should also mention that I have a sector -1. This is basically just a very wide and open hole that I dug out of desperation to put Charles' dog Buffy somewhere. It's still getting used to its abilities and is just running around firing off lightning or atomising everything nearby.
It took my entire reserve three times over to imbue the walls in a fashion that would keep the dog from just running off through the lower plane matter and causing damage elsewhere.
Surprisingly, Buffy does not appear to be the same kind of energy being I am. It has no energy bands or automation or subroutines. The dog is just an energy matrix similar to mine but also merged together with its memory energy bands as one form.
For me, it looks something like the core matrix is the bones, the memories and reserve energy are like muscle tissue attached to the bones, and its single shield or energy field is like skin and fur. All the humans see is a half-invisible glowing ghost dog.
Charles was rather bitter after I told him visiting his dog would probably result in getting atomised if it tried licking his face off. He went in any way, and by some miracle managed to not get vaporised. He played with the ghost dog for hours until it appeared to get sleepy and take a nap, which is strange behaviour for an energy being, because I have no such issues.
Regardless, once we are certain Buffy has calmed down enough to go exploring without blowing a scientist apart because she couldn't control her excitement when asking for pats , sector -1 will probably be consumed by the expansion of sector 0.