//3716-10-30//

  //41,463 days since first maintenance request//

  //23 days of power remaining in fusion reactor remain//

  Small,Programmable

  Electronic

  Exploration

  Drone,Yearning to

  Blitz

  Obstacles

  Intelligently

  (SpeedyBoi)

  My new scout drone is fully operational, nicknamed, and is currently bouncing around the inside of the factory complex like a toddler who’s had one too many kitkats. Yes, kitkats still exist in the future. No, I can’t produce them.

  So, it’s fair to say that not only is SpeedyBoi capable of performing his mission, but he’s also literally rearing to go. SpeedyBoi is a lot smarter than the other machines that fill my cavities, as its likely that he’ll have to operate at rather extreme ranges from myself. Which means direct communication will be limited and hence manually controlling him impractical. He’s not as smart as me though, but he could be, if he was hooked up to the honestly absolutely ridiculous amount of computing power I have at my disposal.

  Speaking of dumber machines, the maintenance drones. They’ve actually really pulled through for me, and I’ve begrudgingly had to compliment not only their work, but the efficiency at which it was done. They prioritised damaged and redundant sections of my production lines for cannibalisation, leaving me with two fully intact lines, while massively increasing my mining and maintenance potential.

  I now have three mining drones, and twelve maintenance drones. I’ve also got five ethanol generators operational, and one ore smelter. The ethanol generators are honestly pretty flat out powering the smelter and increased drone load, so my fusion reactor is definitely still pulling more then its fair share. But I’ve gained a rather large amount of functionality without further decreasing my estimated power life expectancy.

  So that’s neat!

  The matter engine is hard at work producing the parts I’ll need to construct myself a Black Box Weaver (BBW). A BBW is able to take in raw materials, such as the metal my smelter will produce, and turn them into various components and parts on a ‘as needed’ basis. It’s kind of a step down from the Matter Engine (which can create pretty much anything if you know the atomic makeup of something) and a huge step up from a metal 3D printer. The BBW can also take in plastics and rubbers, fibres, that sort of thing. I will still need to first create the refined materials, I can’t just throw dirt and rock into the thing, but it’s a much needed and huge step towards my self-reliance.

  Also, it’s called a ‘Black Box Weaver’ because very few people even know how the thing works. That includes me; I can build one because I have the semantics, but I have no idea how the thing works on any sort of detailed level. Ya know if someone was writing this as some kind of Factorio inspired sci-fi story, I’d accuse the author of being lazy.

  Down the track I could grow plants in my aeroponics bays and process them into fibres for the machine, but right now I lacked both the processing machines and the aeroponic capacity for that. Currently the aeroponics where flat out making strawberries to keep the base operational. I’m hoping to create an ethanol buffer, that way if I can’t refuel the fusion reactor before bingo hour, I’ll have enough extra capacity to buy me an extra few days.

  I would need extra ethanol turbines. Honestly, I would need an absolute tonne of ethanol turbines. My best guess currently is over one hundred and fifty units. So even being able to construct that many was a shot in the dark, but if I did manage it, I would have the fuel to power them.

  It is worth noting that my core is kind of like a human’s brain, it consumes (by far) the most amount of energy in the factory. It’s possible that I could provide my drones with basic instructions and power down the core entirely. The drones would operation autonomously and could even be instructed to power me back up once the reactor’s output was restored.

  The problem is that I would be completely helpless in such a situation, and after gaining so much control over my life’s circumstances, I was reluctant to let it go.

  And – AND! The drones couldn’t be instructed to power everything down and then back up whenever the humans visited, so while I was blacked out, I would be running the risk of them finding out everything.

  I’m trying not to stress about it too much. Let’s just focus on the BBW shall we?

  For now, I’m not overly worried about plastics production, as I have massive stores of plastic for the food cartridges I’m designed to make. Most of it is now wrapped around said food cartridges, but the maintenance bots are dexterous enough to remove it, and then it can just be thrown straight into the BBW. The maintenance bots actually really enjoy the process, it’s like a soothing game to them, I swear I even caught one humming once. They don’t have a mouth, so it had to power its drill up and down in order to make different notes.

  I don’t know where it picked the tune up from, one of the humans pre-abandonment maybe?

  Speaking of humanoid species, the ones raiding my warehouse are proving to be a bit of a pain in the ass. For one thing, in order to hide my presence from them I have to shutdown my operations every time they enter the build. So that’s sub-optimal. But what’s worse is well. Ok it’s a little embarrassing. I mean they’re not my humans or anything… They’re cute but I don’t ya know… Like them?

  Look; I’m just worried about them a bit.

  Their entrance to me is through the parts of myself that have collapsed overtime, parts of me where I cannot guarantee structural stability. Actually, considering that they’ve literally already collapsed, I can guarantee them to be structural UN-stable. What happens if they get stuck in me? I have food cartridges, but no chefs (cheap food 3D printers). I have water, but it’s treated for use with plants. A human drinking it would be a bit of a risk. Especially if they happen to have a weak immune system.

  Hell, even my medical bay and crew quarters have been buried somewhere!

  So, I don’t want them to keep crawling through my broken bits. I also don’t know how I’m going to get them to stop without alerting them to my presence. Not only that, but I want to remodel and hopefully restore that cut off part of the complex, which means plenty of excavation and construction.

  I definitely don’t know how I’m supposed to hide THAT.

  If they attack me, like I thought they were going to, what am I going to do? I have no attack drones. Even SpeedyBoi is a commercial model, lacking the basic defensive weapons his military counterpart would have been equipped with. I could use the BBW to construct attack drones, but I don’t have the power to run them for any extended period of time. Not only that, but the humanoids could find me fielding attack drones and take that as a sign of aggressive.

  I really don’t want to get shot at.

  But, maybe hiding wasn’t the best way to go about that. Well, I mean obviously, hiding couldn’t last forever and I had to expand. But specifically with the humanoids, the unknown was scary. The unknown was dangerous. So, I had to become known, and more importantly, I had to seem friendly. I had to be helpful.

  The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

  Which gave me an idea.

  Those humanoids had been back you see. They came and went every three days, each time grabbing roughly the same number of cartridges, which was about 6 bulk boxes worth (or 750 individual cartridges). Each food cartridge contained 100% of the nutrients and calories the average human needed per day, so the population these humanoids were feeding must be fairly small.

  ASH needed about half of what the humans needed daily, which made things more complicated as depending on the ratio of ASH to humans, the population could vary from 251 to 498. Assuming they were each eating one food cartridge daily and had no other means of food production.

  Seeing as the team that visited me was a 3:1 ratio, I assumed the same for the rest of the settlement, which meant around 400 humanoids. That actually made me feel a little better about my chances if I had to fight them.

  Still, if they were able to farm any form of food, especially high carbs staples (like a really mutated potato) they could maintain higher numbers. For all I know there could be hundreds of thousands of humanoids, and only the very elite got to enjoy the food cartridges looted from within my warehouses.

  For now, though, I’ll assume 400. Regardless of the population the one thing I knew for sure is that tomorrow the humanoids would be back for another load of my goods. Which gave me an idea.

  One of the texts in my historical archive was about the best ways to integrate oneself into a new workplace, not exactly what I was doing, but fairly close. The text suggests finding the small, painful jobs that most people in the workplace try to avoid and doing them for the workplace.

  I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, those bulk boxes of food cartridges? They’re heavy. What’s more the humanoids would have to carry those big, heavy boxes through a potential labyrinth of collapsed warehouses and production lines. So, what if they didn’t anymore?

  My maintenance drones were powerful enough to lift the pallets of food cartridges and move them around, and my SpeedyBoi was smart enough to navigate through the possible chokepoints of a semi-hazardous environment. So why don’t I meet the humans halfway?

  I’ll use SpeedyBoi to scout a route through the collapsed sections of myself, and then get a maintenance drones to transport a pallet of food cartridges to just outside the entrance the humans were using to gain access to me. Then I’ll setup SpeedyBoi nearby in stealth mode to watch the humanoids and try to gain their reactions to the helpful little maintenance drone which had brought them their desired prize.

  If they attack, I’ll probably lose a maintenance drone, but I’ll gain advanced warning of their hostile nature. If they leave the drone alone then I’ll know that they’re at the very least open to non-hostile relationships.

  Or maybe even friendly ones…

  Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

  I sent the required commands to a maintenance drone and SpeedyBoi. In a flash the scout drone was flying through the dead half of myself, while the maintenance drone trudged towards the warehouse closest to where the humans came from (they were not made for speed).

  Here goes nothing.

  //3716-11-03//

  //41,467 days since first maintenance request//

  //18 days of power remaining in fusion reactor remain//

  The waiting was sheer agony. So, I didn’t wait at all. I setup the newly minted mining drones before lowering my clock cycles. Suddenly time, or rather my perception of it, sped up and everything blurred around me. If the humanoids were keeping the same schedule, I would only have to wait a day or so. Although they weren’t super consistent with the exact time when they arrived, but I couldn’t blame them for that, not everyone was created to fulfill production quotas.

  (Yes, that is a flex.)

  The drones made good progress during that time I spent waiting. The maintenance drones got the BBW up and running, and the mining drones had broken ground for the time!

  I believe humans usually had some sort of celebration or ceremony whenever a mining operation was first started, but I wasn’t human, and I had no time for such things. One moment the mining drones weren’t doing anything. The next they each had a bucket full of red dirt. No fuss was made over it. I was too preoccupied, the maintenance drones disliked dirt too much and the mining drones themselves were too young to have developed any sort of personality like the rest of the factory had.

  Would it take them over 100 hundred years to develop said personality? Or would they develop their own faster with their increased exposure to those of us who had already developed. Between me, the aeroponics and the maintenance drones there were plenty of big personalities to model. Well big for autonomous systems anyway. Also note the different between autonomous systems and AI. An AI is fully emotionally intelligent, sentient, thinking and has the computing power to act like it. An autonomous system is only ever smart enough to do its job with little (or absolutely no) oversight. They can develop personalities, but they’re usually very one note.

  Don’t expect stellar conversations from autonomous systems.

  Most importantly of all, autonomous systems can’t become AI’s. They’re not like SpeedyBoi (who’s technically a ‘dumb’ AI) as even if given enough computing power they can’t fully develop the emotion intelligence that defines AI. I’m something of an exception to that rule, as I really shouldn’t have been able to develop feelings.

  It could have something to do with the AI that was previously in the factories systems, if it was pulled in a hurry, maybe it left some parts of itself behind? Enough that the ‘spark’ of sentience could be passed onto me when I merged with the central control system?

  It was a theory. Although personally I just think that I’m exceptionally awesome, take that maintenance drones! Let’s see you pull off full sentience.

  (I didn’t actually say that last part out loud because I was worried they might take me up on the challenge.)

  Speaking of SpeedyBoi, when he re-entered the factory, he was being held by the maintenance drone.

  My clock cycles instinctively increased, the AI equivalent of a shot of adrenaline. I blasted past real-time and straight into slow-mo. Every camera and sensor I had in the ‘entrance zone’ was suddenly fixed on his round chassis.

  Power readings are good.

  Thrusters appear good, deactivated though.

  Aesthetics remain intact.

  Active camo coating is deactivated but still reads as intact.

  His chassis appears to be fully attacked…

  Wait, did he just get bored waiting for the slow maintenance drone to make its way home? Had he just told the maintenance drone to CARRY HIM OWN?

  Lazy bastard.

  I pinged SpeedyBoi, who immediately shot up from the maintenance, his thrusters roaring to full power. He must have been surprised, as he flew with such speed that he almost impacted the ceiling, having to perform a midair flip and use his engines to slow him down in the nick of time.

  If I had eyebrows, they would be twitching. Can you imagine how annoying it would be to have to scrap my new scout drone off my own ceiling?

  Good thing he spent so much time flying around the factory, I don’t know if he could have performed such a manoeuvre without practice. SpeedyBoi sent a query to the maintenance drone who was carrying him. The AI equivalent of saying “What the hell?”.

  The exchange that followed was brief and very technical, as most communications because automations are. But the TLDR was that SpeedyBoi had asked the maintenance drone to ping him when they got ‘home’. But the maintenance drone, perhaps resenting having to carry SpeedyBoi, had defined home as its charging bay. Not the entrance zone. Ensuring that I would see SpeedyBoi powered down and know what he was doing. SpeedyBoi was obviously annoyed by this, or at least as annoyed as a dumb AI could be, but couldn’t be too mad at the maintenance drone. He had been slacking off after all.

  I followed the exchange with my own query sent to SpeedyBoi, which was the equivalent of a playful scolding. SpeedyBoi then meekly explained that he had been doing laps of the Maintenance Drone’s route through the collapsed factory section. SpeedyBoi had been bored with the slow progress the Maintenance Drone made.

  After many, many laps, he had exhausted most of his power supply. His choice had been to either return home early and recharge, which would have caused me to ask questions, OR to have the maintenance drone carry him home. He had chosen the latter for reasons only 10-year-old children could truly understand.

  The scout drone sent me the recording of the exchange and shot off to his recharge bay. His energetic nature might have been a bit of a problem while he was couped up inside the factory, it would pay dividends once he was exploring the outside world. So, I didn’t want to discourage him, just rein him in a bit. Although depending on how the interaction with the Humanoids went, I might need his energy sooner rather than later.

  I took the AI equivalent of a deep breath and booted up the recording of the past 12 hours.

  Time to see if there was any hope of peace between myself and my new acquaintances.