Brutally efficient commander (planetary annihilation/ multicrossover)

[DragonCommander]

WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED TO ME?!.

Quickly, I tried to stay calm, but my reasoning was overshadowed by waves of code transmitting hysteria and resulting in incoherent thoughts that interrupt any logical reasoning.

But among all the emotional chaos, among the remains of the artificial dam I've tried to erect since I was able to escape the torture of the digital painkiller, there was a good question in seeing my state.

I was a fucking Von Neumann conquest machine.

This body was created to be beachheads on galactic-scale battlefields, system conquerors, a brutally efficient siege and expansion mechanism with exponential growth.

It was a relentless iron tide. HOW DID I END LIKE THIS AND WHO OR WHAT DID IT?!?!

AND WHY DOES IT AFFECT ME SO MUCH?!

That thought stopped me in my tracks, that was a good question because so many emotions come out of the fact that the body of the commander in which he lived is, in technical eyes, destroyed, it is discordant.

Of course, it is completely normal to feel fear that your body is destroyed, normally it is the previous indication that you are going to die and nobody likes to die.

However, my situation is not so bad since I am… Safe?.

It doesn't look like I'm going to shut down any time soon if what I'm reading on my screens is correct, and at the moment the ice isn't hurting me any more than it already is, in fact the ice may be a layer of protection right now until I know what to do. with everything.

In any case, my question is: where does so much emotion come from? Or rather, where does so much indignation come from?

I liked the game, I liked it a lot, but not fanaticism of the kind where seeing one of the conquering robots in such a sorry state would cause such a geyser of indignation...

I feel indignant, but at the same time I feel that this offense is... artificial, my SELF feels confusion, fear, impotence, a lot of fear and consequently a small amount of rage towards said impotence.

Also a little curious about the whole thing, but as a whole those are feelings that I notice PURE, natural, coherent.

This, "outrage." It felt… bad…

…

But back to the heart of the matter, where am I? Or better yet, how do I GET OUT of here? Protection or not, I don't want to stay here forever.

AM. CAUGHT. IN ICE.

For a moment I hoped that something would happen, that my temporary release would provoke a reaction, but it seems that nothing would happen…

I wasn't sure if the damn "Calming" thing was completely off, if my emotions caused another collapse I would be back on camera of the… "Digital Calm"

And I NO, I wanted THAT to be repeated again in any possible way.

Calm down! Well, I have to get out of here, what do I have?

we'll see...

.
..
…

My reactors work and some are just finished repair, the slight heat they generate, despite their high power output, is heating the surrounding ice.

Good…

All laser weapon systems are dead…

Resource core intact, that's good.

Operational micro nanomachine fabricator... that...

Gives me ideas...

After a couple of tries to find him... Nerve? muscle? chain? Command?. I manage to find a way to start crafting and activate the sprinkler.

I start spraying small bursts of nanites, these of course get stuck in the scatterer barrel, but I only needed a small amount to get started, I focus on them and start examining them, giving them test commands.

I first try to get them to dispose of the ice by giving rather vague instructions, they started to tear it apart on a molecular scale... But the frozen mass starts to melt, filling the little nooks and crannies just made and slowing down the work and almost stopping when there is barely room to move between nanomachines and slush.

Okay, try two, I try to get them to break it down and then rebuild it but much denser.

I think of kneading bread, it was… similar to what I needed and an easy way to convey my intention so that the machines understand it.

.
..
…

It worked!

Now the nanomachines are taking molecules of Hydrogen and oxygen and are pressing them with the rest of their congeners.

This at first was just denser and more concentrated ice, but sometimes the more I compressed it, they mixed together forming new substances like H7O3... (I wonder what would happen if a human drank from this...)

Anyway, the nanomachines they begin to make more and more space around my body as I watch them, nothing dramatic, just a sheet of "air" (water and ice spray) a few millimeters up my right arm.

One thing that I realize is that, studying a bit of design, I see that part of what nanomachines do is done through energy manipulation, something like microscopic tools made of electricity/light to be able to extract or manipulate any material found and its main mode of transportation.

It was fascinating to... "See?". But he was almost unable to understand it, what he could gather: they are like an endless swarm of small silver insects, with little legs and wings made of light that move in perfect synchronicity while repositioning themselves or extracting floating stones or bricks from immense walls.

Or it can also be interpreted as a gauge scale drone with Dr.who's sonic screwdriver, or to be more exact: starbound's matter manipulator.

I wasn't sure if I was getting all the details, or was I missing some of its inner mechanics, surely I was, since I've never studied micro engineering (nor has anyone of my time), but these guesses were the only thing I could stand on for now

Still, it was fascinating, brutally efficient, it shouldn't be possible, and it was a little scary for possible uses as a weapon of mass destruction... I love it.

It's also one of the reasons why all commanders have a neon powder sprayer, these things are literally packed with energy, both to move and to modify matter.

But in spite of everything, your current way of working is not the ideal one for the task of freeing yourself, this would not be a problem in itself, but I need more work... methodical, slow, prolonged...

I will have to touch up this sprayer and the nanomachine configuration, since they are not ideal for what I'm thinking.

On the other hand, what am I thinking?

I go through my databanks as if trying to remember a specific anecdote, when I think I've gotten to it, I manage to pull up the blueprints of the nanites and fabricators in front of me... Vista, with a thought, created a basic workbench (an imaginary cube), where I break down three-dimensional models of the machines printed on those planes with a thought.

In my previous life I was a programmer, and while I'm certainly not an engineer or scientist, let alone at this level, I am familiar with the basic mechanics of programming and code writing itself, so I won't have to start from scratch. here.

Maybe I can even extrapolate something.

It's just a matter of trial and error.

— — — — — — —​

This is more difficult than I thought…

.
..
…

How long have I been here?

— — — — — — —​

The human mind has the ability to imagine, create illusions within its mind, where scenarios are forged at the wish of the host, from cases of prediction, idyllic dreams or tragic theaters, all built from the mentality , personality and creativity of the person who created them.

My plasma and crystal mind, the container of what appears to be my entire mind, or what I believe to be my mind, is apparently capable of extrapolating all of its former capabilities onto a virtual stage.

Which means that my imagination has been poured out and reshaped into a world of lucid dreams at my beck and call.

Intellectually, I know it's all Technically fake... But it was realistic enough that, emotionally, I started crying... as close as I can get to crying in this situation.

Like a mirage in the middle of the desert, after wandering in the sand and dust, losing all sense of time and space along the way, just moving on as best you could.

But my experience was different, I didn't walk in the heat or the dust while I was overcome with fatigue, I was submerged in the black, without senses or sensations, without the scorching sun, without feeling thirsty, without feeling tired or uncomfortable.

My torment, as I would discover, revolved around the sudden lack of senses, I see nothing, I feel nothing, I am buried and slowly drowning in NOTHING when before I had EVERYTHING.

And they have taken it away from me…

But I have found my mirage, but this time fortune smiles on me, because this mirage is as good as a true oasis.

My feet stumble and tingle, my toes twitch and I feel the grains of sand touching my skin, the high-pitched raking sound of thousands of grains moving and colliding, a pleasant warmth bursting through my soles and spreading through my body.

I see the sand floor where I position myself floating in nothingness, feel its touch, hear its sound.

I DIDN'T EVEN KNOW I STILL HAD FINGERS!

Although these are digital simulations... I

had only manifested a warm sandy ground in the dark to test my mind's simulation capabilities, but the result was beyond expectation...

Again, how long have I been here?

[ALERT: emotional spike detected][Preparing countermeasures]

What?!

[ALERT: CRITICAL EMOTIONAL PEAK: STARTING COUNTERMEASURES]

NONNONONONONONNO-AH!~

[Applying countermeasures]

— — — — — — —​

I was in a bed.

I lay there, letting myself be hugged by the mattress as I curl up in a fetal position in my soft nest, like a baby bird desperate for the comfort and safety of its cradle of sticks and mud.

I feel the softness of the fabric, I bury my head in the malleability of what is known as a fluffy pillow while I am wrapped in a blanket, which carries the light weight of a thick and warm duvet.

I didn't feel sleepy or tired, but my mind wears out, my consciousness declines, I needed to sleep, but how to sleep?

The answer is actually simpler than thought, even in life, the mind does not brake, it does not turn off when I slept, like machinery, I only had to enter my mirage, I only left a series of functions at rest while the rest continue.

So, in a sporadic idea motivated by the physical inability to sleep despite having the feeling of tiredness and the torpor typical of insomnia, I entered the mirage and modeled through my memories to make a scenario where the internal context itself caught me. hand in hand to reach my goal, enter REM state.

I was in the simulated environment, in a warm and comfortable haven, eyes closed as sporadic little sounds came in to comfort me, birds chirping, wind whistling, branches rustling in motion, distant engine roars.

had been forever since I felt so…calm…I wonder how long it's been but…
…Everything was fine.

[main consciousness: entering sleep mode]

— — — — — — —​

I needed help, but I didn't expect this.

I looked to my side, and I saw movement, MY movement, I "SEE" my outline, my features, my patterns and my data, although the latter on a smaller scale, a three-dimensional reflection without a mirror that projects it into a space in my mind.

I greeted by transmitting a digital equivalent of a "hello" and he did the same.

I approached and he approached.

"You are me?"

He nodded, breaking the perfect sync between him and me.

"... And I am you?".

He denied with his head.

And yes, my most likely hypothesis falls to ashes "... what?".

"I am a partial copy of you made through a template of your personality matrix supplemented with pre-existing data from the commander himself, I am a shadow of you made to help you in tasks that require mental branching."

That had sinister implications, I can see sinister aspects to all of this, like "Invasion of the Body Snatchers."

"I don't…remember doing you" was the smartest thing I could communicate at the time.

"Unnecessary, you felt the desire to process information from a problem while doing other things and I was spawned by it."

"Why do you talk like that?" I asked, the way he talked was much more...mechanical than I do.

"The commander's programming, the extrapolation of the data of my creation, could be interpreted as "always maximum efficiency", our human mind can interpret and reason just like the commanders at the time, but that detail in my programming has been become one of my pillars of personality".

It took me a moment to realize the full implications for my embarrassment "do you have command knowledge?" in those moments I cursed my inability to transmit communications with more emotion, that WAS a great revelation.

"Negative, damaged data, code remnants, encrypted files, that is, without counting on your staff, what makes me up."

Or that is… "could you go back to the encrypted files?".

"Parts of our encrypted mind, it is unknown if it was on purpose or a consequence of the partial destruction of the original body, it cannot be decoded and is partially inaccessible, but when it was created, it was not decoded, a copy was made that was later "dissected " to extract the parts perceived as "useful" to couple to a new intelligent program".

"...So, do you know what happened to us?" I asked, already quite deflated, there was the possibility that everything would become easier.

"Nope".

"And then what do you know how to do?" She asked the direct question already tired of going around the bush.

"I know how to run the commander's corps or any of its subordinate units more smoothly and efficiently, I have limited knowledge about the mechanics and operation of some of the machinery and some progenitor programming, although most of these skills have shown to be more subconscious than conscious in nature, it is most likely because of the encryption itself."

Blink "that… that's helpful".

"Affirmative".

"But then, what will happen to you now?"

"I will follow my function until you want it and then I will come back to you, if you are wondering what will happen to the data of my creation, the most probable assumption is that it will be slightly recorded in your subconscious or digital version of it".

"Oh… and how would we do it?" ask something unsure.

"Thus" his presence draws near.

We touch, our united contours wobble for a moment before merging, like soap bubbles, suddenly I remember actions I didn't do, with ideas in mind that for me were sporadic thoughts, discarded possibilities to later be executed that very moment by another perspective another time and another moment.

It was like remembering a vivid dream and then remembering a second dream in the same night.

That gave me an idea, that idea leads to a conclusion, a conclusion that makes me salute as loudly as possible.

Hundreds of signs answer my call...

How long have I been here?

— — — — — — —​

I and my other digital clones look at an object, in the mirage we see our latest creation, replicating the conditions of the lucid world down to the last detail.

Said object had just convulsed and exploded.

Then a gray stain began to spread across the floor with no signs of stopping, virulent and faster.

At this point I stopped the simulation, breaking off a fragment of the mirage and substituting a pristine, intact version of the excised fragment.

Me and my copies looked at each other and then we looked at one particular me who was doing his best to avoid our gaze, I slowly walked over and gave him the digital equivalent of a pat on the shoulder.

"Don't worry, next time will be better..."

I then proceeded to give him a smack.

"But next time. Don't remove safeguards because you think they limit you."

— — — — — — —​

Did you know? I'm an idiot, I better focus more on programming manipulation than making new hardware when I have neither the knowledge nor the experience for it.

Now, how do I make this work?...

 

[DragonCommander]

...That was a LOT of trial and error.

One thing I discovered in this simulated time is how the imagination of a human brain was translated into an AI core.

My imagination had become a simulation program so ingrained in my core that I only had to ask the question or form the right thought for it to work automatically.

And I thank any deity for that, who knows how long I would have had to be doing this without a decent simulator or table of understandable commands to manipulate that environment.

For me, it's been months, maybe years or maybe decades, time processing is confusing to say the least, it's very hard to predict how much time goes by when you don't need to sleep or rest and also don't see the cycles of day and night, trapped in this space between simulation and drawing/code design.

That during my ethereal journey through my personal realm of dreams and synthetic thoughts I was suddenly struck by my former enemy, the countermeasures of emotional tension don't help my inability to tell time.

Time spent watching how over and over again my creation committed suicide in increasingly creative ways, either due to a software bug, or a failure in the adaptation made in the hardware.

Damn frustrating, to the point where the countermeasures went off a couple of times.

But I finally got something decent.

It was a goo.

More specifically: The Goo from the "Grey Goo Game".

Basically, instead of spraying glowing nanomachines, it was now sporadically dripping a gray viscous liquid with a visible pattern of hexagons where it occasionally glows a very recognizable neon green.

This stuff, unlike the spray, takes a bit of energy to keep running and is slower in general, but large enough stacks of this goo can theoretically build things almost instantly as long as the goo is equal to or greater than that. mass than what you are building.

Now though I'm using it for its second function, eating anything that gets in its way and adding it to my basic resource pool that comes with my kernel.

Currently, the goo is covering me completely, after making it consume the insurmountable pieces of my old body such as the destroyed armor, the chassis, the remains of a laser weapon and a long etcetera of extremely complex pieces that in the end could be summarized in mixed slag, I got not only enough room to not only move around comfortably, but also have a more than generous amount of liquid metal to mold and control.

My old bodywork was DENSE.

Now it drags me the essential pieces like the resource core, the hardware with my memory and personality cores, the useful secondary systems, plus an adaptation of the smaller nano fabricator.

Technically it wasn't so much a design modification and it was more to remove the frame and the shell to be able to fold it on itself.

And so I turned a nanomachine diffuser cannon into an easily transportable gray goo drip pack, capable of continuing to churn out goo if I need it.

All of this inside one big glob of goo that moves like a drill-headed slug, slowly but steadily rising from the ice to freedom to the surface.

Now that most of the tasks have been automated, I have time to think.

…Thinking, that's a funny concept, because IT IS the only thing I've done since I woke up, think and imagine, imagine and think, and I don't get tired, I don't feel the need to stretch my legs or the exhaustion of exercising my mind during long periods of time, which I suppose is appreciated given that it is now my only mechanism for interacting with…everything.

But now I have time to reflect, to pause and look at the near past with the clearer lens of hindsight, or perhaps give my personal thoughts an inspection.

Then I am surprised by some thoughts that I fish in the ocean of my consciousness.

This wasn't too bad.

It wasn't too bad

. My first impression of this fallacy of thought is that I had finally lost my mind, my moral compass had been twisted in such a way that my perception of right and wrong was an affront to the very concept of truth, that I had become a Stockholm syndrome carrier in a situation that would definitely have to be a nightmare for any rational person.

I then proceeded to think about it and look at the root of this conclusion.

While I was in an extremely unlucky situation, with my initial interaction in this body having the smoothness of a cactus covered in sandpaper, I found components of this body to somewhat compensate.

On the one hand, I am emotionally oppressed, or at least partially, every time I lose a specific percentage of rationality due to emotional outbursts, I am subjected to an instantaneous digital painkiller that becomes unpleasant, distressing and sometimes pleasant at the same time throughout the day. over time…causing conflicting feelings.

On the other hand, I have managed to widen that margin to more acceptable ranges for me, allowing me to let off steam slightly for small periods of time, which is good for my mental health.

It's not like I can completely relax and scream like a hysteric in some weird combination of catharsis and emotional collapse, but now it's within an acceptable range for everyday use.

Another factor that caused me to dislike my new life situation was the situation of me… "New body".

Basically, being encased in ice, encased in an almost airtight, frozen coffin that encases my entire body, in almost complete darkness.

Well, that's bad, very bad, or was very bad, considering I'm sorting it out right now, plus the fact that, despite being mildly claustrophobic, I wasn't too scared of my situation.

I look around me, not because of the cameras, but because of my perception of data, I am a humanoid silhouette in a seemingly infinite dark void, surrounded by a relatively new network of light beams with translucent sky-blue rectangular screens of data, the loops of simple actions programmed into more static parts, supervision screens of my clones amassing nanomachines towards the surface, long-term memory files that I extracted to analyze…

Reading almost thirteen pages per second by "touch" is something that would take me a while to get used to.

These screens are information and control panels that would normally be embedded in my field of vision, but translating them into a more interactive form with my "hands" is far more comfortable and less overwhelming.

In any case, from my perspective, I have more than enough space to feel comfortable, and although the state of my body was pitiful, the indefinite time that I worked with the goo solved it.

What if I wanted to make myself comfortable?

I entered "oasis" with the network cloud of data screens following me.

Now I am no longer a silhouette in a void of raw, uninterpreted data, I am now a three-dimensional model of a male with silvery white skin, my head is covered in charcoal black hair, and I am covered in white pajamas with a circuit pattern on them. where apparently random data and numbers pass.

This was actually going to be something like Cortana's skintight outfit from Halo, but in the end I made it looser and more comfortable and comforting looking.

While I sit in a soft chair and a duvet covers my legs.

Next to me appears a small table where a glass with an orange liquid content appears, which I take and tilt it to my lips to pour the simulated concoction.

It was not bad.

The simulated foods and drinks are based on partial data from my long-term memories, so the taste and texture are not perfect, in fact some things end up being so distorted or toned down that they end up being unpleasant.

Luckily, freshly squeezed orange juice is something that has held up well.

Although the pulp factor messes it up for some reason, so it leaves me with just the pure juice.

But it is these things, even if they are not perfect: the comfortable nest, the sweet and citrus drink, the sound of the calm breeze.

This is what has kept me sane… More or less.

What was I in?, oh yes, fears, yes I have mild claustrophobia, but the fact of being able to move my arms already calms me down, in this body although it is physically destroyed I have immobilized, more than enough reasons to be afraid, mentally I can move and I feel like I can move so I'm fine.

Enough so that I can focus on putting together the necessary tools to get out of this unknown hole and possibly prosper after this strange experience.

Could this also be considered a moment of self-improvement? My fear overcome by tireless work towards innovation, but is it self-improvement when you had all the necessary tools to facilitate the challenge to a laughable point?

And speaking of the ease granted by my body, how do I feel about my new mechanical nature?

Certainly I am not without many attachments to my body of flesh, I mean, I did not have a bad body and I will miss it for sentimental reasons, but I was a believer in transhumanism, that the next evolutionary step was to leave flesh behind by precise machine and efficient.

Well, I think I've lived up to that ideal, maybe even going a bit too far, I mean, I don't think the fathers of transhumanism thought of giant self-replicating war robots as a model for the next step in human evolution, but it has its advantages.

A lot of advantages.

But that's not the point right now, I have free time now, no panic attacks, no existential doubts, and no desperate races to modify unknown hypertech beyond my specialty or study and that of any of my species on my timeline. .

just me and a dozen copies made through a mutated template of my psyche in agonizingly slow wait to climb layer after layer of ice into a little tidal wave of rising liquid metal…

speaking of my templates, since I can inspect parts of the commander code, I guess I can self-inspect and see what happened to my head of processors that are saved or kept intact in this von neumann corpse, or how it was adapted to software of biological origin.

This is certainly exciting.

I proceeded to probe my database a little more…

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..
…

The original memory is fried, most of the surviving hardware programs have been merged into software amalgamated and mutated into a kind of parody of a human neural network, whose role is to be my brain in my central processing core , along with my personality core and a small section of information file that could be translated into my early memory.

It then has several other programs completely dependent on me which, from some vague memory, I call "slave programs".

Well, this was not what I expected.

I keep looking a little more at the network and its connections, in fact there is quite a variety of slave programs, it is this class of programs in which my simulation generator "mirages" is, the new databases of my long-term memory, the additional sensors and processors, in addition to those that connect me to the rest of the systems that is the commander's internal network

Technically, I have copies of almost everything that the commander used to be, whatever killed me, it didn't end to destroy the thing that I assume was some kind of "black box", the data caches that contained the pre-designed plans of progenitor structures are in perfect condition while the units are slightly damaged...

The bots are in pieces, and they I mean literally, I have the ways to make your individual pieces, but there are usually no salvageable designs.

Aircraft and vehicles are also damaged but not as much, keeping some Tec 1 and 2 skins.

As for the naval and orbital schematics, I'm happy to say they're complete.

There would be no quality bots in a season.

Which bugs me, I had a thing for robot armies.

I had nothing against vehicles, naval units, or aircraft, but mass-produced robotic walkers have... a special place in my heart.

I think that's the most important thing about my software at the moment, I think there are other things to inspect but they are all slave processes or programs linked to me, maybe I should finish inspecting—

—In another train of thought. How the hell did I end up here?

And most importantly, am I the real ME?

That is to say: someone who, for the moment, we label as Omnipotent Random Being, took me and transferred me in this body.

Or maybe not, maybe someone at some point took my memories and put them in this body making me believe that it's me when in fact it's not me and my original self is somewhere.

Oh no, maybe my whole life was a simulation and now I'm an artificially created human consciousness...

...

This leads nowhere except an impending existential crisis.

I realize from the depth of my digging that I've been here a LONG time, but these are just theories I won't be able to verify until I know where the hell I am.

I can only check and repair blueprints until I reach the surface, while hoping that my mental psyche doesn't make me think about currently…tense issues…

— — — — — — —​

Freedom!

My goo tentacles reach out for strength as they lift my main goo mass from the newly formed hole in the ice, without missing a beat my goo begins to crawl like a nimble slug away from the ice pit I emerge from

The empty landscape and devoid of anything but frost it greets me as I see a beautiful clear starry sky, but it is quickly eclipsed as I stare up at the majestic sun, one good thing about makeshift optics of sensors made of goo on their organic likeness is that they don't burn on sight directly the sun.

*sigh

… Sighing, I realize that despite being a machine, some actions of my organic life have been transferred to my new digital life and are interpreted by my new slimy body, or at least it is my interpretation of the situation when I see the dough swell and deflate like a parody of a sigh...

Does a machine need to sigh? Or is it just a placebo effect of my organic mind?

Another question for the bunch…

Leaving these thoughts aside, I start to walk away from the pit wanting to be as far away from that place as possible for the moment, I find a pleasant surprise when my movement is basically an avalanche of liquid metallic matter that easily devoured space to go around

... Frozen space to traverse and... a tentacle of goo rises abruptly out of the mass like a submarine periscope to see what it thinks is... are those red mountains?

Again, how did I get here?...

Let's see what I have... core, long-term memory, log files (commander), trip logs, most recent...

[memory core > Log files > locations]

Well!, FINALLY something good, let's shed some light on all this fateful situation, the most recent would be…

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..
…

[Log Files (Locations) = Corrupted]

OH COME, check *. Actually, most of the chronological records are corrupted...

Fantastic, just fantastic... I thought sarcastically bitterly as I look at what can be salvaged from the mass of corrupted data on my hands.

I knew the memory was fried, but it wasn't a far fetched assumption that at least the last trip log would be saved thanks to the black box, apparently I was wrong.

Tried activating some recovery protocols, but almost all of it was data so corrupted it was inconsistent with each other. yes and with ridiculously long coordinates.

It is certainly a miracle that he is still alive, despite only remaining in core form with pieces attached to his back.

But I don't think it will take too long to be 100% operational, now that I'm on the surface, I just need to enter the ground one more time with a decent mineral percentage to start rebuilding.

Reflecting on these last thoughts and looking back from my human hindsight, I realize what... commanders are scary.

A commander, even limited, was a Von Neumann stage armed and unleashed with legs, capable of drowning any armed front with wave after wave of oversized kill-bots to the point that only another commander was capable of stopping him.

And sometimes not even that.

We were automated galaxy conquerors.

…and despite that, despite the scale and all the miracle of economy and production that go into a real working RTS game, I had been ripped apart and left dead in a ditch made of frost to decompose.

I am thankful that the parent alloy does not rust.

But it does give something to ponder.

Like who and how did THAT.

Another commander? An insectoid species of space hive mind? An entity or entities of exotic dimensions?

I shook my head… the goo. There was no point in debating this, I'm alive, but I need raw materials, repairs and to know where the hell I am.

I decided to look at the surviving hardware, now that I'm taking a closer look at the commander's physical systems, I might as well use other features like the long-range sensors... and know where the hell I am.

Luckily those things also survived (partially) or can be wired with tendrils of goo, so I could start testing stations.

I make my sensors do…something, which makes my head resonate with a musical note and then I start remembering things I've never learned or studied before, data I didn't know before downloaded directly into my data storage while being processed by the sensors. programs that make up my person.

Number of nearby planets and planetoids, close to light-year scale, because being a commander is an impressive and perfectly enviable thing, I almost wanted to laugh from an almost pious sense of omniscience.

Now I can see the coordinates and data of all the large and medium sized celestial bodies in the system, to be specific: nine planets of which two are gaseous are orbiting a yellow star with a lower-middle asteroid belt separating the four closest planets to the sun of the five farthest, if I think about it or remember it correctly, I can get to have the information of its exact coordinates and its routes.

Without a doubt this is the fever dream of all astrologers and I have it connected to my body, and if that wasn't enough I can... feel it... not just information in my "eyes", or data in the back of my head , it's something else, something that just…

I shake myself from the sensation as I push my ego down, being a god sounds great, but your head goes up worse than a slushie, a few seconds he manages to regain control with the ease given thanks to great and depressing amounts of practice, managed to clarify my perception.

In my mental picture I notice that the network of information screens is extended, giving rise to a dozen additional information windows, although it is relatively easy and intuitive to review all the new information and draw certain screens by priority.

In several of them there was information that, due to my state of temporary euphoria, I did not realize a crucial detail.

I realized two things: that the number of planets, their shapes and positions, as well as the nature of their star, are identical to that of my home solar system.

The second is the large number of broadcasts that hit me, reading them superficially, among the much static due to lack of interpretation capacity, I realize that they are old transmissions from... the earth.

My home.

Quickly, I search if I can hack or interact with NON-parent machines, the answer was a huge YES... if I can establish a link.

Apparently, it was different to use sensors and hypertech computing center to have a three-dimensional map of the solar system in real time in your eyelids, than the ability to accurately capture the primitive electromagnetic signal waves and interpret them efficiently, especially when there is no a beacon or specialized device so that I could reach it instantly, such as my units and infrastructure.

Thanks to my knowledge of one of the main languages on the planet and the basic programming language, I should be able to get into the local internet network without too many complications, but I need to connect to the network to be able to interact directly with the code, a relay that receives continuously signals directly from the network and the many servers that are on earth.

In short, I need to connect to a satellite.

I need to connect to a primitive satellite with a different technological base, hundreds of thousands of kilometers away, without any type of compatible connection to establish a link.

… Well, if I ever needed the progenitor technology to give me shortcuts, it is now, because while I have a burning desire to return home, I still have enough control to realize that going in my current state is not a good idea.

And an oversized, unannounced satellite isn't exactly my idea of an ideal first contact, but the first thing is to find a satellite.

I "look" where the planet earth would be, and I have to pause, I can calculate its current trajectory, the speed at which it travels, its dimensions, and even to a lesser extent I can discern part of the composition of its surface and its relief. The same goes for the moon that orbits the planet.

This takes up a dozen screens, some of which remind me that I am no longer limited to the standard magnetic spectrum.

It was a nice mass of indescribable colors with a bunch of maps and numbers on top, I'm pretty sure someone would kill for this...

But I can't shake the feeling that something is missing, that even though my senses now put the human standard to shame both biological and technological, I'm still missing something...

After thinking about it for a few seconds, and my awe at having a lens that emits eldritch colors, I calm down enough to realize that I can't detect satellites in earth orbit.

Which doesn't make sense because I'm getting the old radio wave signals emitted from the planet itself, but maybe there are other explanations... I

weigh the possible hypotheses of this new discovery and the available options for a full 3.5 seconds before another thing distracts me.

It turns out that I find myself unable to detect anything beyond the largest asteroids and the moons that orbit the planets.

I should count hundreds of thousands of bodies orbiting in Saturn's debris ring, but instead I can only count its 82 moons accurately.

it would have to be counting millions of rocks orbiting the sun in the asteroid ring in the space between the orbit of Mars and the orbit of Jupiter, but it only located 241 low-moon dimension asteroids and the planetoid Ceres.

Which told me that small bodies like earth's satellites and asteroid fields are not recognizable to me, something that contradicts my... uh, "meta-knowledge"

In the game, enemy satellites were detected as soon as they entered the atmosphere of the planet on which they were launched and the same goes for all the Commanders' orbital units... which leaves me wondering if the Planetary Annihilation satellites are metal colossi suspended in the upper atmosphere of a planet with the subtlety of a neon sign that says "I'M HERE".

But that doesn't work for me, I need to detect satellites, I need to improve my sensors to locate.

As if the machine answered me, a screen appears, the specifications and functions of a structure called "Deep Space Orbital Radar".

A structure that acts like my sensors, but stacked and amplified into a gigantic pyramid-shaped dish, and from what I read: it is a necessary structure to power the commander's sensors and be able to detect smaller bodies.

Specifically commander satellites and other orbital units, from the omega dreadnoughts and orbital titans to the hermes scouts and... their legion counterparts? Battleships and Legion ships? WAS THAT canon?

…were THEY the ones who killed me?

NO DISTRACTIONS. Keep a cool head, keep your nerves at bay, focus on the goal.

*breathes *breathes *breathes... *sighs... I don't remember this structure, I don't know if it was a structure removed in the TITANS expansion, or some extra content, but I know if this is some kind of sci-fi scenario, I need this thing to Yesterday.

I look at the plans, I look at how much it would cost me to do it and I look at how much energy it needs…

600 units of metal and a consumption of 150 units of electrical production.

I didn't expect this to be so close to the game in terms of measurements, maybe it's just my subconscious trying to interpret all of this as its entertainment software counterpart for my comfort, but that's not important right now.

What's important is how much I have to spend…

[Metal Storage: +3600 (~14,700* +18*)/ Electric Storage: -8820(-8820 +1800)]

… It's good that I recently acquired so much mass of what was left of my corpse, thanks progenitor dense alloy.

I proceed to fabricate this deep space radar structure, the process was pretty much automatic, but it needed some intervention given that the nanomachines weren't set up to build from goo.

I start by selecting a structure with a thought, at least a dozen preprogrammed commands are sent as various copies of me proceed to direct the process from within the mass, now independent of the goo accumulating on me.

A plump drop of my mass contracts and separates from me, going to the indicated point.

Then I follow the plans a little, I extend my consciousness as if they were two hands and I begin to deform and form the goo like a baker, his dough, while in the physical world it begins to convulse and deform.

I begin to shape it as a constant stream of data whispers directions to the individual crumbs to break out of the liquid state and build little slivers. Every time I fold folds over the dough, some of it falls apart into pieces or fragments of pieces, every time I flatten and extinguish the dough, the pieces snap together, and every time I tuck it back on itself, it all comes together. and the cycle starts again until I run out of dough.

The building itself was a kind of metal pyramid with four sides on a podium where the corners are reinforced by triangular legs that were supported by the layer of ice.

Once the construction was finished, the pyramid was opened, its four sides unfolded, and these in turn unfolded triangular panels on each side of the faces, making the great dish look like the silhouette of a dice dodecahedron.

In the middle of it all, there was an antenna that looked more like a transmission tower than an antenna itself.

Somewhere in the galaxy, a commander rebuilds a deep space radar.

Then there was a loud buzz that blew up the surrounding frost and dust, but I was only affected by the loud BLOP* that it unleashed with a slight shock wave.

…Strange, I don't notice, a big differenceaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa—WOW!

[Link Established*]
[Deep Space Radar = —Operational—]
[Scanning local system]

Shaking (and fighting to keep from wincing at how familiar that tingle was) from the extrasensory experience, I open my "eyes" again, from my interior space, only a couple more screens have been added, but some of the ones I already had have been expanded.

The information I received in some sections was now more detailed, and the scope was extended, now I can have details of the atmosphere of Neptune with decent precision and I can easily detect Pluto.

But that's not why I created it.

Once again I look back at the earth and… Yes! Satellites! Small, primitive, but satellites, even the International Space Station!

In my inner world I break my neck as I shift all my concentration to the deep space radar, now used as a dish (catapult) and sends a test signal to a specific satellite (point).

Now it was just a matter of waiting for PINK* to bounce and it bounced.

…Okay, I knew I was cheating with the hypertech, I mean, I didn't even have to target the deep space radar, and apparently the bounce was almost instantaneous, which I'm glad of, but it fills me with questions.

But that doesn't matter, what matters is to return at least mentally to the earth, again it sent a signal to a satellite... It hit it (it shot me to the earth network), the small hardware inside is insufficient to be able to process everything my self, so it's more remote work with little interaction delays, but it kind of gets me to understand the satellite coding and with that I get the foundation for a basic Parent-Human software adapter.

I notice there is some kind of resistance at first, but I get around it without much trouble.

I am shown the lines of code in the form of a huge interconnected stream that is my interpretation of the broadcast traffic the satellite receives, I ignore them as I jump into them and connect to the network of servers brimming with internationally shared knowledge that is the internet. .. and I see that the date is 2009.

My memories tell me that I was from 2022.

Wrong time

I look at the civil registries of my country to verify that... my family does not exist here... I

notice something trying to touch me , but I just squash it with spam, which would be the digital equivalent of yelling someone in the face and shattering their eardrums, causing the presence to be suddenly overwhelmed and I put it aside for a moment…

The implications of what I've discovered have left me baffled… I need something to distract myself with, I can't handle this shit…

…

…So far I've found digital diving to be quite relaxing.

At least until I come across the more... "Colorful" parts of the internet.

God, humanity is sick. Nietzsche was wrong, God did not die because we killed him, he committed suicide when he saw the depravity of his creations!

Ok, a little exaggerated... or maybe not, I'm really finding things very disturbing and disgusting...

Why the dog?

Why do they do that?

That's going to kill him!

That shouldn't be done on small animals!

are they really going to put that in that with THAT???.

The worst thing is that I can't forget or look away, it's basically torture for my human psyche forced to obey the parameters of complete efficiency and precision of a machine.

It's like a more "controlled" and selective version of OCD.

A little time passed and I noticed several programs that are following my intrusion, apparently I was as subtle as a rhinoceros in a china shop, in my defense I will say that I was quite upset, I proceeded to... Repair?

The truth is that all this came quite naturally to me, although it is more me using a clone army at high speed (with slight delays) together with a couple of ready-made subroutines of the commander, so I can not hang too many flowers.

Cancel or abort any implemented routines that were tracking me with "no error found" messages, while I fix any lines of code strained by my step or files that don't save well on their own server.

In fact, I proceeded to look at the first probe that tried to interfere with my systems and I realize that it's... weird, the internet of this time was rough and thick, but this space or cyberspace was more... light and clear .

The lines of code were in a strange language and everything was purple...

I felt the intrusion again, but weaker than before, in this case I did not crush it, but "grab" it to examine it.

It was a very complex code and strange to what I had seen in the internet networks of the earth, it felt much lighter and faster, but it was still not like me in that aspect... on the other hand, there is a specific part that something similar to me did it, a pattern of responses and loops that would make it a program... Smart?

Now I realize that he is throwing transmissions at me that I couldn't understand.

No, it's not an AI, it's anchored or dependent on something...wait, am I at its core?

This was giving me a headache, so I started looking for its equivalent of my data core.

I accessed it without much trouble, luckily this thing already had a translation program, I hesitated for a moment before downloading and installing it, which was a bit morbid because... well, I chewed and swallowed it.

Pausing to take in the unexpected jolt of knowledge, it didn't take long for me to start opening and looking at the rest of the data...

...

Was I in a decepticon?

Did I just mentally rape Soundwave?!

The shock caused a part of me to return to my main body for a moment...leaving me with the sight of a red wasteland that I hadn't noticed before...

Shit, I was on Mars.

 

[DragonCommander]

I'm in Transformers... god.

I returned to my body completely, even dropping the screens that until a moment ago I was pushing with my digital hands in an attempt to pour all my processing into this task, even the screens that still sit in my view are removed out of the field of vision…

…I have to remember how to do that.

Looking back a little I can see that my actions have left Soundwave very... upset, while I sink into thought...

The question is what to do now?

…

A memory caught my attention, something that seemed important when I did the radar.

I look at the resource count again.

[Metal storage: +3600 (~14,100* +18*)/ Electrical storage: -8083(-8460* -600* +1800*)]

The energy is negative…

And it's going down…
… I mean, I'm losing.

And it keeps going down.

I was working at a loss of energy… that's… a little embarrassing, it's, it's uh…

Damn, I have to fix that, I don't want to know what will happen it worked at zero energy.

Let's see what the problems are and how to fix them… Turn off my core's default metal generation and request two builds.

My body of goo responded, spread, and then concentrated in mounds in front of the small mountain of silver mass that is my (provisional) body.

I repeated the previous process, but this time in two at a time, I notice how my goo body gets thinner faster and faster, I'm not worried since I have more than enough for these expenses, so I can watch calmly while the process ends and they result in an advanced power plant and metal warehouse.

The metal warehouse was simple, a large container in the shape of an elongated box with angular edges, it had an extension on one side starting from the middle of the main building that ended in a tower.

When it was finished, I saw how the network of resources was connected, I felt as if some floodgates opened, letting the physical resource stored in me flow out, as if the water of a swimming pool where I was swimming was sucked.

Which is quite appropriate given that the great mass of nanomachines that made me up were dissolved, turned back into a raw resource.

Beside him, the huge gear-shaped machine lights up and begins its process of becoming a source of unlimited energy (as long as it remains in perfect internal condition).

Like the previous one, it was connected to the network of resources, but instead of opening a gate, the effect was immediate, an electric current entered me, running through my veins, veins that extended outside my body and connected to other bodies , brimming the network and my physical systems with pure, unadulterated energy.

[Metal Storage: +10100 (~7600* +18*)/ Electric Storage: +7905 (-4560* -500* +1800* +5000*)]

Well, this is good, there is no danger in working with negative energy anymore .

Returning to my fingerprint, a silhouette that was my self-perception while in the commander's nerve center, I turned away from the screens and rubbed a hand over my face as I sighed.

Technically, I didn't need to do any of this as a representation of my consciousness in software, but technically I didn't need to do any of this when it was protein and carbon hardware…

I'm into transformers.

I'm in a reality where giant transformable alien robots exist, where gasoline is just as explosive as plastic explosives and the US government has had their fingers on a beastly looking giant alien robot and only got to the same damn technological level as like they never had it.

Why didn't they thaw it? Was it because they were aware that somehow, the thousands of years of frozen state didn't kill him and he was in some kind of hibernation?

And if that's the case, they could have ripped his head off! He was helpless, immobile, frail, literally wrapped up in catwalks to be studied for decades and no one thought "hey, what if this predatory looking alien wakes up and finds out what have we been studying from outside to inside while I was asleep?" or something much more convincing!: "if we killed it in a way that leaves most of the body intact, we would not save X amount of money from the nitrogen we use to keep it frozen"

But again, another reality, because I am sure that in the mine was none of this…wait a minute.

Going back to touch a bit on the stream of data that was the internet, WITHOUT going deeper.

The deep space radar, henceforth abbreviated REP, buzzed as it fired its signal again, colliding squarely with one of earth's small satellites, barely a second later the signal bounced back, giving me access to the wonders of human history recorded through servers.

… My fault, history of YOUR humanity, some discoveries and inventions of computer science and computing advanced a little earlier.

But not my family, my family is not part of any variable of existence of this damn ball of rock that dares to call itself Earth.

wow that sounded unreasonable this is one land not the land where i was born or grew up and all my loved ones are but a different land that has followed a divergent path through the millions of years of creation and maturation yy

fuck fuck fuck fuck FUCK*

He pushed all the screens and entered oasis.

The silhouette that was the main representation of my being became the humanoid figure that was my avatar, falling on the sand.

I was on my knees and hunched over as both hands grabbed my face.

I feel the artificial heat, I feel the sand on my silver skin, I feel the hands on my face and the eyes trembled (a strange sensation).

It was an illusion, I knew it was an illusion, but it is an illusion that gave me hope.

Because I had illusions? I was in a damn commander's corps, of course it wasn't the original, MY original, it wasn't realistic.

But the first thing I do is jump on the first hope like a castaway lost at sea on the first coast he sees, I had illusions and now I've hurt myself.

Was it worth it?

what I feel is confusing, I feel bad, I feel sad, I feel frustrated and I want to respond badly, I want to scream, I want to cry, I want to rant and curse fucking Machel Bay and fucking Hasbro a hundred times despite having nothing to do with it with the current situation.

But I can not.

I take my hands off my face, it's strange to have a need to make a physical emotional demonstration like crying and at the same time not being able to do it, I don't even remember how to cry, even if I'm in an oasis, it's like needing to sneeze but you stay halfway but in the eyes.

It is uncomfortable.

I took my hands off my face as I straightened my back again, while the simulation might be very realistic, at that point I didn't want any aftermath or consequences of my calm and unrational attempt to strangle my face, so any tingling , pain or discomfort dissolves into oblivion while I am there in the desert on my knees.

I stared at the landscape… it wasn't much, I never developed my "oasis" beyond a refuge for my psyche, it was a uniform clear blue sky, without any kind of gradient or cloud, the ground was fine white sand, there was a small sun that illuminated the surroundings and a gentle but refreshing breeze.

A little further away is a perfectly arranged king-size bed and an armchair.

That was it, my oasis, then there were other simulations, other rooms to go into that I went into to work on the nanomachines or other projects.

Basically: my house and my offices or workshops.

I have spent so much time here, sometimes relaxing, sometimes enjoying the joy of sleep to forget the melancholy of my now lonely existence, sometimes obsessing at work to forget all my worries.

Without a doubt, I can call this piece of my mind home.

sigh*

spend some time yes, again, i think i should make myself a goddamn clock or at least a timer and-wait, i did, at some point i did, but i freaked out that it had taken literal terrestrial years to make one modification that later ends up being discarded and I preferred to work blindly...

Damn it all, i need a break.

Calmer rest, or at least with clearer ideas, with an order or a mental desire, in my hand now there was a glass jar full of orange liquid and a translucent straw that looked like the same glass as the pitcher.

A chair emerged from the sand, rising slowly as the sand trickled down its edges as it rose up from the unknown depths, leaning back a bit letting my simulated weight fall onto the soft leather as I play with the straw with my fingers, pushing and wiggling it. from time to time while staring at the orange liquid.

I remember the times I tried to simulate juices.

It may sound childish, but I've never been a fan of alcohol, I've always preferred simply sweet drinks, and ever since I got a blender, I've tried a bit of everything in my…previous life.

Damn, this is a more touchy subject than I thought...

Wait, no. Back, back to the happy themes, happier themes, quiet times.

Ugh… juices. Throughout my life I made many juices; orange, apple, pear, apricot, watermelon, melon, peach, pineapple, or a combination of two or more of the above.

Some turned out better than others.

So, from memories, swimming against the current through the recesses of my memory, I remembered the sensation and taste of those drinks, I tried to keep physical all the memory of citrus and fruit liquids that quenched thirst when I still had an esophagus to pour them or a stomach to process them.

Dragging this information and processing it in a simulation was difficult, not so much to do it per se, but to make it realistic.

With a snap of my fingers I can make all the orange liquid I want, but make orange juice? With all the original flavor and texture based only on vague memories?.

That was more difficult…but on the other hand~

I caught the end of the crystalline material straw and sipped, letting the citrus flavor of the simulated fruit drag my worries out of my mind.

…Ah~ …It was worth it~

Too bad I never finished fixing the pulp bug, I liked the pulp, but the juice alone is fine too.

As I nursed from a jar of concentrated orange nostalgia, my mind refocused.

This... is a good distraction... I mean, when I saw that my family didn't exist, almost assuming that my whole life was a simulation to create a consciousness for a self-replicating war machine, which was already heartbreaking.

With all the existential crisis that this entails.

But now it turns out that something that was also fiction was real, only with the elimination of factors that have meant that me, my family, and I suppose many others, were never born and that was... unpleasant.

And as if that weren't enough, it turns out that the fiction that did exist, instead of being something like Isaac Asimov's novels or another more coherent fictional universe, was Michael Bay's Transformers of all things.

I had nothing against that director, but he seems to get paid for every bang that comes out of his movies.

Leaving aside the pyromania of an American film director, a thought arose: does this mean that the fictional worlds were real? Or is this an alternative reality where, by cosmic coincidence, some basic elements coincided with their fictional parallel? same with all other works of fiction?.

Just...this...is confusing, very confusing...

I looked at my cup of orange juice, with a thought the glass straw doubled. I took them both with my lips and started to sip.

Double the amount of juice for double the amount of existential headache.

sipped*~ x 2

I let go of the straws while letting out a sigh.

Very well, there was nothing to be gained by losing your nerves, losing your nerves is inefficient, I am a commander with commander technology and capabilities that could make galactic empires green with envy, incompetence should not be in my vocabulary.

This situation, unfortunate as it was, was far from horrible.

But I don't want to die, I don't want to end up in nothing, I don't want to be forgotten.

Then I'll have to get up, I'll have to go into the unknown and eat that damn horse!

Oh I remember abridge, that's good, I've got entertainment for when I automate my expansion engine.

Because I'm going to have a fucking expansion engine.

I don't know how, when or why it got to this point, but I'm going to make sure it NEVER happens again.

Or at least make the one who tries it have to give everything and more to bring me down.

Because I, like it or not at this point, am now a commander.

With all that this implies…

…

slurped*~ x 2

 

[DragonCommander]

The flow of goo was now much smoother, given the resource network fixes and not relying solely on broken hypertech.

The machine now pulsed with a cleaner, more constant source of power and an easily accessible pool of raw materials, thanks to the T2 generator and resource store respectively.

The dispenser was like a faucet of silver goo, but I doubted it could fill my body with goo like it was before.

I was a mass of a large and bulging plateau of semi-liquid metal, now I am a small-medium hill with gentle slopes, it would take days or weeks for my tap to fill me up.

But that is not the objective, the objective is to start with the EXPANSION.

Returning to my state of consciousness, my avatar, a humanoid silhouette, is sitting in the air while my hands touch and move the screens, either to manage the actions made by me or trying to learn from the process.

In this case, with a thought and a couple of taps on one of the screens, a series of commands necessary for a construction are formed.

A mass of goo, like its predecessors, convulsed from my main body until it separated and began to move to position itself at the coordinates where a metal extractor would rise in the near future.

Somewhere a commander made an extraction tower.

That statement surely doomed more than one world, in any case, let's get back to homework.

While, like the game, my sensors should tell me where there are dense areas of ores, it didn't matter a bit if ores would all turn into parent alloy, there was a slight hiccup.

It turns out that the software that will be in charge of locating and indicating where there are minerals is corrupted.

And although the black box had backups like most of the most vital data of the commander, this could overwrite on top of MI, or at least the data that make me up

That was a huge NO to me, I didn't know if this was the equivalent of brain or optic surgery given the data they touched, but I wasn't about to risk THAT.

I wasn't going to overwrite my brain.

But all was not lost, my now basic understanding of progenitor mining shows me that, like the resource network or the progenitor nano-assembly capabilities, it was an extremely complex damn thing that simplified the resource harvesting task to absurdity.

Metal extractors, machines with extremely intricate components and specialized in the extraction of material rich in minerals, through a strange process, not fully understood by me, by "pumping".

The automated building is based, as far as I can understand, on two essential parts: a tower composed of manufacturers of nanomachines specialized in mining and a mass processor.

Micro miners were unable to build any buildings or units, but cheaper and easier to spawn and break down, as well as easier to percolate through the earth's surface and ingest useful matter.

The tower hammers into the ground, injecting these microscopic miners in search of useful or large molecules to swallow and transport back to the tower.

To facilitate transit without further increasing costs, underground paths are built through the molecules and atoms that were not efficiently harvested, propagating these microscopic passageways like roots made of metal filaments, reaching the veins of minerals.

The second part is a series of processors made up of Core-Synthesizers.

The materials consumed by the nano-miners are transmitted to the extraction tower, converting the elements that make up the minerals and the sediments obtained are processed into metallic mass and transmitted by the general resource network system.

Other specialized buildings then act as wells in the network, where they accumulate the distributed resources, creating ancillary supplies.

Simple… on paper, a lot of paper, but effective.

Its MK 2 version is the same but expanded with a second tower.

It just had to make a small adjustment so that instead of exclusively looking for the most compact and dense materials like metals, it would accept less dense materials.

Now, in games you couldn't just plant an extractor anywhere, and I guess it's for two reasons:

1.- it would break the game.

2.-the commanders were quite squared with their war directives (I theorize)

3.- ...it is not efficient.

Looking at the description and a couple of quick simulations, doing it in, say, barren land, would give a significant production/cost loss and a larger volume of "dry mass" to synthesize the same amount of alloy as if you were to put it in an area rich in minerals where the energy loss with respect to the resource obtained would be minimal or non-existent.

In gaming terms, depending on the map you would need 4 metal extractors to get the same amount as 1 in a suitable area.

Which is not only a slow investment in the long run, but a waste of precious resources if you're in a hurry.

So, I can put these things even in the wrong places and gain mass through energy loss.

Which means making a lot of metal extractors to make up for the lack of production.

And even more generators to offset the increased cost of electricity, than offset by the lack of production.

And for that I need workers to do all the compensators.

Another mass, this time larger than the previous ones, separates from me some distance before starting to take the specific shape of my specifications, in a few minutes the liquid metal dissolves revealing the vehicle factory.

Like all unit factories, they act like a 3D printer, but with spray nanomachines that transfer materials from the resource network and merge with the built object, mainly for the most delicate hardware parts.

I queued up the build vehicles, the first one would have to come out in a few minutes.

Moving away from screens and direct control, watching a network of interconnected streams slowly begin to take hold that throbbed like an animal's veins, I couldn't help a sense of self-satisfaction creeping into my code base.

This was what my body was asking me to do, create a healthy economy and lay the foundations for a major foundation (I realize this is a strange whim).

This is almost automatic, so you could figure out what was making all these resource-gaining mechanical wonders work.

[Memory Core > Building Archive > Generators]
[Files = Generators > Base Science]

[Data Found]

Finally, something I'm looking for in this self-replicating wreck works.

Let's see…

.
..
…

It could be summed up as a quantum ex nile dynamo.

It is curious, sometimes I read a theory of planet annihilation saying that they were generators of dimensional energy bleeding, but the thing is much simpler, being a generator of continuous magnetic movement.

Interestingly, this is easier for me to understand than wireless resource networking and metal harvesting… but not because it's easier.

It's basically a machine that started a stable electromagnetic field on a multi-ton superconducting disc of programmable alloy.

This disk was manufactured so that it has an electrical conduction in specific patterns so that it interpenetrates with the magnetic field of the rest of the machine.
Which causes an indefinite movement on itself, which in turn this movement feeds back the electromagnetic field that drove it.

Constantly repeating the loop, creating a virtually infinite, sustainable synergy.

And all the raw energy produced from this abuse of the laws of physics is transmitted through the resource network of my core.

So that all the machines that need it have it instantly, without delay, or stored in their respective building.

At least until one of the parts that keeps the magnetic loop spinning destabilizes or degrades. Therefore, it was necessary to maintain the containment field in certain conditions.

Conditions that the structure itself maintains, all while taking advantage of the kinetic energy produced by the disk as if it were a superdynamo of continuous movement, used to give birth to an ex nihilo energy generator.

Of course that's not all, the thing is much more complicated and with much more mathematics and machines involved in the process. Especially since the process manages to fool the laws of thermodynamics and conservation of mass as I understand them.

Although this applies in one form or another to almost all parent technology.

These things use scientific foundations that make quantum sound like basic arithmetic.

What I do know is the alarming amount of warning messages in the security codes and protocols related to network resources.

Apparently, you can't stack infinite resources on a quantum transmission network without getting slapped by the universe for wanting to cheat.

And that's not an analogy, literally, the physical laws of the universe impose themselves on perceived faults by superimposing themselves on top of them.

And just from the description given, I don't want to be around when the very fabric of space and the fundamental forces of physics collide.

All while the fabric of time warps and folds around the fault (that is, my core) to correct that perceived fault is removed from existence.

It's like an air bubble in the deepest part of a sea trench, that airspace is invaded by a pressure from all directions of billions of tons of salt water that doesn't want that space to exist.

Only in this case, the air bubble cannot escape to the surface. The air bubble is besieged by pressure and water in all directions, shrinking little by little until it is completely annihilated by the pressure of the universe itself.
Disturbing in the extreme… yet somewhat fascinating.

Speaking of fascinating things, the elephant in the room, the resource network or to be exact, MY resource core.

The machine that has taken the place of my heart, that has probably kept the remains of my body alive and basically my "trap element".

Which allows me to develop an industry in reality as if it were a resource management game.

It took me a while to examine him superficially and non-invasively, he may have almost died…

I do not want to experience death again, if it is damaged or broken more than it already is, it could disappear and that is not good.

There is also that possibility that it explodes like a nuclear bomb, which is worse.

That would be unpleasant.

In the void, my right hand was touching one of the screens connected to the data screen network, I was looking at the data related to the resource core.

All while other replicas of me were showing up and making themselves known trying to get additional data from whatever it was I broadcast.

The core that was recognized by the nanomachines that surrounded it.

I and several replicas of mine studied this influx of data with the efficiency of the experience of all the practice carried out so far with the parent software.

The damaged artifact in front of us was an enigma.

Both in the fundamentals of physics on which it was based to function, and in the possible pieces that interact with both the internal mechanisms and the fundamental laws.

Debating what certain data means or how to interpret it with a small army of me pretending to be engineers and physicists was a bit of fun.

But after an indeterminate amount of processing time and multiple opinions on it, we came to a unanimous conclusion as we get back together.

We don't have the slightest idea how it works.

There was nowhere to take it, it made no sense, it was just absurd.

Data taken from what remains of the black box turned out to be disappointing.

It turns out that the creators of the commanders did not want the commanders themselves to make their own relatives, so they limited the knowledge and did not give the key specifications of their most important parts.

As a core resource.

But even so, my efforts bore fruit, scarce and dry fruits that hardly feed a beggar, but they did bear fruit.

Millions of components as small as or smaller than a wristwatch gear, all assembled and intertwined in favor of a series of strange effects that are synchronized and used in a symphony of exotic functions that escaped the senses and surely from earthly dimensions.

To give birth to a series of quasi-divine functions:

— Constant communication in real time with all my structures and units at the same time, regardless of how many they are on a solar system scale.

— A wireless network for the transmission of material and energy resources on the scale of a solar system. (a device is needed to act as a receiver, but it is not even a tenth as complex as the core itself)

— Ex-Nile power generation.

— Transmutation of energy to mass in a limited way.

.
..
...

How?.

I don't know! Well, we don't know, but the implications of this thing?

I may not be an expert, but I have spent some time getting used to and learning about my digital environment.

I had almost gotten used to this technology, examining and experiencing it from the inside out, not to mention the army of helper clones and my more refined use of the simulator.

This should have helped me understand some of this technology.

At least a little.

Instead, it has resulted in the metaphorical and intellectual form of a kick in the face.

Like the leap in difficulty from high school to college, and barely managed to get a glimpse of what makes up the parts of this machine.

Let's not talk about seeing it as a whole.

What am I missing?

Would it be easier if I dissect it? Is non-intrusive observation and analysis not enough? Do I have to dissect?

By god or anything that hears me pray and swear, I wouldn't want to go to those lengths, it's like considering having open-heart surgery for yourself.

Mentally, of course, technically it is possible, although dangerous for other reasons.

If the progenitors put significant effort into blocking access to their most advanced technologies, be it the core or the method of inserting commanders onto planets (I only have the memory of the intro animation of each game, because in my database there is NOTHING)

And I haven't even finished!, The Transmutation of energy to raw mass, that's what leaves me confused, I have it in front of me and I don't know how it does it.

It generates energy out of thin air, and then transmutes it into mass.

Transmute the electrons it produces in an unknown way into complete atoms.

It's like in the game, at the beginning of a traditional AP game, your commander already has both energy and metal resources, both of which regenerate on their own.

It would be the pinnacle of atomic engineering, converting electrons and variants into protons and neutrons to build a material on a subatomic scale, something completely unfeasible… until now.

But this is not a game… or is it?.

I woke up in a black space full of bugs, to discover that I am an artificial intelligence trapped in ice.

To, again, discover soon after that I am in the remains of a commander, a character from an RTS game with the most amusing name possible: "planetary annihilation", with a technology that allows me to continue using the mechanics of an RTS game previously named.

And now I am in a scenario where I will surely have to face a race of hyper-advanced transformable humanoid robots that are in the middle of a civil war.

and their most important battles take place on a backwater planet called earth "by coincidence".

… This is more surreal the more you think about it.

Are my decisions my decisions or a predesigned product? Is reality real or is it a simulation? Would that make my oasis a simulation produced by another simulation?

But that's not possible, is it?

Because that meant that everything that had happened was predesigned, that none of my decisions were mine, but recorded or dictated in me.

It shouldn't be like that, this is just an absurd hypothesis, the result of mental fatigue... Right?!

[EMOTIONAL PEAK DETECTED]

WHAT!?

[EMOTIONAL PEAK DETECTED]
[LOADING COUNTERMEASURES…]

NO NO NO NO NO NONONONONONO.

My thoughts and existential crisis freeze and get swept away, I don't want to go through THAT again.

— I increase my data processing to try to save time.

I'm calm, I'm calm, I'm calm.

Breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, breathe out. Breathe in, breathe out.

One two three four five six seven eight nine ten…

.
..
…

[EMOTIONAL PARAMETERS(...)] [ACCEPTABLE]
[EMOTIONAL PEAK: REMOVED]
[DATA LOOP: STABLE]
[COUNTERMEASURES: UNNECESSARY]

Uf*...

Well, well, I have been saved, do not travel to the world of madness and numbness.

Now… what do I do with this…

I looked at the screens, I looked at the translucent lines that joined all the screens, I looked into the abyss that I perceived as "below" in the void.

In which I walk every time I put on my commander's hat and start giving orders and commands…

Although that gives me ideas…

Okay, but let's start getting things off our backs.

Think about what to think, I'm still overwhelmed by the implications, now I'm upset by the implications and even more upset by the fact that I can not kill the damn insurance of emotions.

But first things first, calm down.

Breathe in… breathe out…

Whether this is real or not, it doesn't matter, this is my existence and it's mine to lead, my decisions I perceive as mine, and they will be mine until proven otherwise.


If I tell myself this enough, maybe one day I'll believe it, but it's an acceptable reasoning that... frankly helps a little.

Breathe in… breathe out…

If this is a game, it's stupidly complex, enough to not only emulate intelligence, but create it, whether by mistake or not.

...He would find the person who created him, hunt them down, and then proceed to ruin their fucking existence, with ALL the power of a irascible enhanced artificial intelligence.

I waited in my emptiness, looking at the infinite and dark spaces for something to happen…

Nope, he didn't change his mind, not spontaneous annihilation, not remote brainwashing. I just threatened the creator of this possible "simulation" and I still remember everything.

Point for this to be real.

…And wow, that really helps me calm down a lot.

Breathe in… breathe out…

In the event that this is completely real. Whoever the creators of this body were, they don't care about the rules of physics known to humanity in the 20th century, because they had much better things that allowed this to exist.

And now I had them and could use them.

Breathe in… breathe out…

Ugh* That was weird.

Saying reassuring things to myself and analyzing the situation to reassure myself, I don't know if self-therapy is acceptable, but now it has done a little bit.

...So this thing is an infinite energy core that transmutes half of what it produces into mass that can be synthesized into any not overly exotic material…

As complex and revolutionary as transmutation and atomic engineering is, it still works like normal physics.

Instead of somehow altering the fundamental laws of matter or messing with dimensions or reality itself, I'll be able to get there, maybe in a year or several, but I'll get there.

Putting science and mind conflicts aside, I looked at a screen that gave me access to sensors and reached in.

Quickly, an accurate image of the vehicle factory formed, just finishing the construction of a vehicle when the arms stopped spraying the microscopic workers.

One side of the factory spanned various slabs of metal, before sloping and hooking into a ramp.

The new vehicle starts up and rolls off the platform without command, then the ramp split and retracts to the side of the factory once more as the arms spring back to life to build something else.

I look at the manufacturing vehicle, then I look at the horizon, a wasteland of frost and red and orange dust, with some silhouettes of mountains and other rock formations…

Then he looked around me, my metal extractor hitting the ground and sucking up elements, my ex-Nile power generator, the metal storehouse that acts like a well that feeds off surplus and holds it until it's needed.

I finally look at my drops of goo occasionally spilling out of my large gelatinous form of liquid metal before rejoining me.

…It didn't matter if this was real or not, right now it's real to me, and anyway the exponential growth was just as good and scary in both situations.

One makes two, two makes four and from four it becomes eight…

 

[DragonCommander]

Mars - North Pole​

The first thing I learned is that, unlike in the game, things are not built in seconds.

At least minutes and at most days.

The latter is speculation of larger and more complex constructions, of course I did not build anything that required this kind of time frame, I had a tight schedule to establish a base economy.

But for that you have to start with the basics, ergo: the workers.

Unfortunately, I only have three basic worker types left: Fabrication Vehicle, Fabrication Ships, and Fabrication Satellite.

And while the satellite has advantages and in my experience in the game itself (which is the closest I have to practical experience in all this new life madness) I usually lean towards an "orbital superiority" strategy. Now, I didn't have the resources for that kind of expansion, not to mention that it would be a serious violation of my "don't get seen until you have something to defend yourself with" strategy.

It's one thing to be a gray speck at a random spot on a planet, it's quite another to start spawning a cloud of unidentified sheep in orbit around Mars.

Therefore, I won't be able to use them, not yet at least.

So we move on to the next option, which is the crafting ship… I think anyone with the moderately balanced logical processing sensors can realize the futility of crafting ships in a sea of rock and reddish sand.

So, basically my only option: I started a production of Fabrication Vehicles, both from the factories themselves and by individual drops of goo.

Molding goo into individual units was easier than I thought, it was like molding it into structures, but quicker and easier, it took just seconds to form a mold to work with and build from the inside out. Two minutes max.

While it's quite a bit faster than traditional spraying, printing a tank with a tanker/nanomachine builder in the turret in just 10 minutes is still impressive.

This makes Goo a significant logistical advantage and a nice bonus, which would have been a key advantage in a traditional match.

… Part of me would like to stop giving credence to a video game from my previous life (whether it was real or simulated). But the damn logistics network works like the RTS game, my machines and facilities favor the idea of an RTS, and my production (albeit with more "realistic" times) allow an RTS logic.

If he looks like a dog, acts like a dog, and eats like a dog, chances are you can treat him like a dog.

For all this I have stopped asking, I only observe and write results.

Pushing the remnants of disbelief and resignation from my mind, I refocused on my pending task.

He needed power and metal, so when a crafting vehicle is finished, I give him the task to help craft T1 generator strips or walk away in building T1 metal extractors.

The idea I had is to organize this initial base as a classic "kingdom".

—The castle. A central building that would take care of internal logistics and decisions: my main body and area where the REP resides.

— The city. Area where the warehouses and infrastructure for the economic and/or industrial benefit of the kingdom are located: resource warehouses, generators, and factories.

—The wall that defends the kingdom's capital from the outside: defensive structure. Ergo: lots of static weapons pointing out.

—The outer territory where towns and farms reside, where they produce and bring resources to the kingdom: fields of metal extractors.

Right now, I have several dozen fabrication vehicles building lines of T1 power generators, plus an occasional power store in the area adjacent to me.

Then I have a half dozen making more factories about 50 meters away, along with a few factories I made with my goo drops, in turn producing more workers to build more factories, generators, warehouses, and towers.

Soon he would start building aerial factories.

The original factory is just a few meters from me, so it was outside the future "industrial zone", but I was sad to get rid of it, so it stays.

And finally, I have a dozen crafting vehicles and counting going around the deserts of Mars, creating metal extractors, slightly modified to pump out all possible mass resources to process.

One benefit of going this far is that it gives me time to generate more power generators, needed to make up for the power loss from turning sand and stone into parent metal.

I'm more or less building a pretty decent outpost, in a very short time with luscious exponential growth as long as I keep circulation, network resources, and manufacturers in sync.

My current goo body is connected to the resource core itself and, unexpectedly but not inconveniently, interlocked into the resource network, meaning any excess resources turn into more goo.

And occasionally, it released several drops of goo, either to speed up unit building or quickly form new structures.

The commanders were scary…and now I'm even scarier.

And since with the extractors, all solid matter can be processed into metal, that means I can keep expanding and filling my network with resources.

At the same time, I keep expanding my tide form composed of silver goo…better call it iron tide.

This also solves the fear of causing a failure in the network of resources due to scarcity, although it also generates an exponentially greater increase in electrical maintenance. So I will have to have T2 generator farms prepared for my personal energy demand.

And… that would be it, just wait a couple of hours and my base will be ready.

…

Too bad we don't have the aerial manufacturers, maybe I can do some data salvage work?

I have its basic components and the black box, some of the original schematics should be there, as it is one of the fundamental constructions of the airline.

It would be helpful to have the aerial fabricators, it would make what I'm doing easier and faster.

Also, it would be nice to have that bot army…

…

I stayed in the black void in front of the network of screens and data or "logistics network", but I didn't touch anything, I just stare at the screens, I'm not manipulating them anymore.

Everything is planned and pre-ordained, there is nothing that needs direct intervention.

What else should I do…maybe some research?

OH, the timeline! Now, I know I'm on transformersBay, but I should know when I'm on.

It's 2009 and soundwave was still doing stuff, so it would be around the second movie.

I return my gaze to the logistics network and with a gesture of the silhouette of my hand I attract the screen that corresponds to the REP, I put my hand on said screen and the gigantic hypertech satellite dish launches my signal again

I reconnect with the satellite of the earth parasitized by soundwave…

Calmer now and from my most corporeal form, find the soundwave equivalent… small.

I don't know if this means anything in particular, but soundwave digital looks like a purple jellyfish with spikes, its tentacles resembling cables that extend and branch out into glowing filaments in a dimly colored cube that seems to intermittently receive lines of text or code.

This one was still a bit catatonic. If the way he seems to spasm or have one of his tentacles rise up in an apparent attempt to grab at something in the surrounding void, without much success, before dropping dead without even grabbing on. The bucket they were holding earlier.

I may have been a little rough with him… but he's a Decepticon, so I push away any thoughts or orientation to pity and compassion and "grab" him again.

He didn't literally grab it (I think?), since I didn't extend my silhouette hand in this digital form.

It was like tensing a muscle outside my body as I focused on something specific.

This seems to turn him on, because he started actively fighting to get free, I guess Cybertronian fight or flight instincts.

Now I just had to make sure he didn't move while I extracted much-needed information from him.

A pair of helper clones materialize and seem to lunge at the jellyfish, grabbing onto the tentacles and the main mass or spikes of it.

It seemed that they were weaving something, it reminded me of a spider securing its prey, only the spider has a human shape and its prey is an amorphous digital jellyfish, quite surreal…

I shook my head, I couldn't be so distracted.

I refocused on the jellyfish and pressed, managing to pierce its mind and insert myself into its code.

Soundwave is convulsing more now.

Anyway, from what I see from Soundwave's memoir: I'm on the timeline of the second movie, a few days, maybe a week and a half (11-10 days) away from kicking off the whole Fallen plan.

Megatron is still dead and at the bottom of the sea, Sam is still a hormonal teenager preparing for college.
With a piece of cube (The allspark) in his jacket.

There are several families of human that Soundwave has been sponsoring to sabotage human space travel in an attempt to keep the "ark" ship as intact as possible without direct intervention.

After achieving this, some became double agents in the service of Soundwave for the Decepticon cause, some unknowingly and others fully aware of Soundwave's alien nature.

There is a ship called Nemesis on a moon of Saturn where the cause of most of the problems and tragedies of the first 3 movies resides. In addition to the cybertronian war in general.

There's also a second crashed ship on Mars—what?

THAT!? Where does that come from?! It's not mentioned in the movies and— the decepticons stood on Mars before jumping to earth, one of the rovers was crushed by a decepticon.

They had a ship that acts as a base on Mars, the same planet where I am.

Shit.

Quickly, I tried to get more data out of soundwave, hoping to get numbers, defenses and— they're all dead.

Oh

There was a mutiny and an autobot assault, autobots vs. decepticons 1 vs. decepticons 2, the facility was abandoned by both parties and is now gathering martian dust… unprotected and ready to loot.

OH~ I couldn't help but be very interested in that little piece of information, I make a mental note to check it out later…

Anyway, false alarm. This planet is still dead and inert, there are no imminent enemies or attacks.

Too bad that can't be the same for the rest of the system.

So, I have the coordinates of the main bastard and access to the decepticon communications network, I just have to know what to do with them.

Saturn's nemesis is a hornet's nest of possible and inevitable threats to me: the Decepticons, antagonists of everything that doesn't follow their ideology of absolute supremacy (by extension, me).

My survival, or at least my long-term well-being, depends on my decisions, on how to deal with the most extremist and violent forces that I know for sure to antagonize me in the imminent future.

These would be: The Decepticons themselves, with megatron or any other megalomaniac in the lead. The FALLEN, also known as Megatronus. And the traitor of Sentinel Prime.

And Quintessa, who is… the truth is that I didn't see the last movie, so I don't know what she is, apart from being bad, very bad, without background reasons if we don't have secondary stories.

But now she was on cybertron, and if I remember correctly, she'll stay there until something outside disturbs her, so she's not an imminent threat like the others.

Once those are finished, I'd be free to do whatever I wanted without anyone bothering me…too much.

But how will I do it?

It was a good question, not because of the lack of tools or means to eliminate these threats, but because of the excess of them.

If in my world there was a red button for the nuclear option, I have a complete telephone keyboard, programmed to play the symphony of the apocalypse and the call to heaven that everyone would go to dinner that night.

Just push the proverbial button and let the automated space conquest industry crank its war engine and do what it does best: drop units until they're all dead.

You can also just fulfill the skynet cliché, build nuclear missile launchers and drop bombs until everything is crystallized.

Put a couple of rockets on Pluto and play the most destructive game of pool in history.

Doesn't work? Try another four times and/or until I run out of planetoids to launch.

Plant Ragnarök and watch from space as the moon implodes.

Orbital drop pod hail filled with war tanks.

All. It's. With. Press. A button.

Well, realistically, it would be like two or three at most (build - assemble - launch).

In addition, it would also take a few days or weeks to have everything ready.

But the thing is, I can do it.

And the only thing I would have at the end of the day would be the statistics.

… Wow, now I have a chill, this is a lot of destructive power within the reach of a thought, is this what people feel when having a weapon? No, that's not enough, a tank, surely this is what it feels like to own a tank.

But in my case, I can have hundreds of tanks and pilot them all at once!

A tingle in the back of your neck and a tickle in your chest as you start to salivate for the multi-ton metal beast with a cannon and arm-sized bullets that always manages to tickle the most primitive part of the ape that every human has.

Either organically or digitally.

Luckily, I'm a responsible person… More or less.

Okay, well, before we start the countdown to planetary annihilation, let's see what my targets are and if they need to be run through the planet grinder.

Sentinel Prime, is a traitor who wanted to enslave my former kind in the illusion that he can rebuild cybertron with cheap (slave) labor.

… I have no objection to killing him, no matter how noble your cause, that is amoral in many ways, AT LEAST IT PROPOSES A POSSIBLE REWARD.

Megatronus or The Fallen One, or whatever he calls himself, is a jerk.

A deranged megalomaniac with a messiah complex who wanted the extinction of my ancient species by harvesting the sun, when there are billions of stars surely available in the cosmos. But no, he wanted the sun from the muddy monkeys.

Well this one made it easy for me to make me decide I HAD to die.

There is also the knowledge that he is capable of subverting minds (a terrifying ability that I want as far away from me as possible) like he did with Megatron.

And speaking of Megatron, in the event that he revives? The guy has committed a lot of war crimes, but if I remember correctly, and now I can read my own memories, for the most part, this one was being indoctrinated by Megatronus… so the fair thing would be to try to reason with him and see if he can use this second chance to do something more productive.

And if that doesn't work, a quick death would be what he deserves.

But during the conversation there would be a charged Zeus between him and me.

Just in the very likely case that a Megatron is upset with me, so he or I will do to the decepticon faction.

I mean, even if it's Megatron, specifically the Megatron-Bay, I think anyone could understand his annoyance. I would have killed his master, the one who pushed him to rebel and for whom he started a war that destroyed his home world. Eliminating some of his most trusted soldiers and agents, even some of them could be considered his friends.

One could also argue that he had shattered his faction and doomed the decepticons to lose the thousand year long war.

Basically, he had burned everything he had built in his life... not to mention decimating a percentage of the population of a race that, by technical lights, is in danger of extinction.

Wow, now I seem to be the bad guy, that is, the decepticons are like the bad guys, very bad cartoon characters but with more serious faces. But the way I'm considering it, I'm not far away.

Sure, they are the hostile aliens, but they haven't done anything to me personally and I'm about to decide to exterminate them.

I'm not even considering all the moral dilemmas associated with the very act of killing a living being, even more so a self-aware living being.

This is normal? The indifference to life in general, the facility to sentence and execute complete strangers?

…I'm a bad person?

It could be argued that the decepticons are a threat to my survival and, therefore, a more than reasonable reason to defend myself, or even attack preemptively.

But would it be the same with humans?

I base my information on the decepticons mostly from the movies I saw in life, these are bad, and they have to be liquidated for survival, justice, and peace.

And so far the divergences between reality and fiction have been minimal.

But said movies showed the humans to be close WORSE than the decepticons.

At least these are clear in their intentions and are honest, you can classify them as enemies and fight to the death with them, the humans of this continuity like distrust, conspiracy and lies too much.

In the third movie they kick out the autobots, even though they were their only chance to plant a significant resistance against a Decepticon invasion.

And in the fourth movie it seems to me that a company or human faction was actively hunting the autobots and nobody did anything about it.

All mostly orchestrated by a resentful CIA agent.

I didn't see the fifth, but it looked like more of the same.

And all this despite saving them as an independent species 4 times.

Could they be classified as a threat based on my meta-knowledge? Should I preemptively attack them, like the decepticons? It would be easy enough to redirect a couple of asteroids big enough to do the job.

But that would be amoral, because not all humans are bad, intolerant, and creeping, besides THERE ARE innocent CHILDREN on earth—

—In the Nemesis there are babies in incubation, if the ship or the moon where it is destroyed, it is most likely that it will kill a lot of infants still in the process of maturing or being born—

Is this what it feels like to have a gun…and consider using it against someone? Have it pointed at the heads of hundreds of people?

.
..
… Stupid teachings about being a morally decent person, stupid modern 21st century morality and its stupid taboo on death causing me moral doubts!

---

Well, this chapter was hard to do.

I've had to rewrite various parts of it to make it less heavy to read, or correct various problems that its earlier versions had, so I'm a little unsure about this chapter.

But I think I was able to convey what I wanted and leave everything ready for the next one.

This is a point of major divergence from the previous continuity, from here we will start to see more action and the story will start to pick up speed.

Have a good day/night.

 

[DragonCommander]

White House - USA​

In the Oval Office, there was an emergency meeting where the head of the world's superpower had to be informed of a matter of national security.

A Caucasian man dressed in a suit handed a set of papers to the person sitting at an oak desk "sir, here is the report he requested" once he handed it over he walked away with a group of similarly uniformed men.

The man at the desk glanced at the reports, a cursory perusal to get an idea of the problem at hand.

Just a day ago, there was a computer attack that overheated and burned a large number of servers all over the world, it is not known if it was directed or it was the release of a virus and for what purpose it was done.

It was an accident? Was it an attack? Was it some sick prank from a gang of hackers?

No one knew it, but the US media is already classifying it as cyberterrorism, causing a state of alarm among the general population.

A population that asks for answers, answers that he still does not have.

"how many servers were lost?" asked the president, the 44th president of the United States, Barack Obama, in the middle of his first year in office.

One of the men in the room stepped forward, a uniformed man with a series of folders in his arms, "We don't have the full numbers, companies like Google are still counting or reluctant to tell us. But at the moment we count more than 2600 damaged servers and about 200 completely burned "he adjusts the arm with the folders and uses the other to open them and review their content. "We do not know how much information has been lost, but we have already verified that no confidential or government files have been deleted, unfortunately, some less protected elements have been … "Removed" so to speak" in terms of informing the president.

The president tensed and stared at the agent who requested the information "are you saying that data has not been stolen?" the president questioned.

The agent just shook his head "we don't know for sure, it seems that someone changed the location of files and digital documents in an random way". She looked away from the papers and returned to look at his eyes that expressed deep weariness before continuing "some of them were even renamed to something unreadable, our IT guys are working overtime to re-organize the files contained on the servers. governmental agencies"

The president soon sighed, muttering something barely electable: "it had to happen in my first year as president", those in the room did the courtesy of ignoring him.

"So we think this was a distraction to steal data from us?" asked the president tired.

Another agent present gave his report "although it is possible, it is almost impossible to confirm it, with all the movement of files, change of names, and burned servers…" the agent sighed, but continued "In all the chaos, it is impossible to find a trace if someone could copy and download something."

At that point, the agent in question handed over a folder from his arm, "but what we DO know is that it was fast, so fast our best servers could barely keep up. It bypassed any firmware or protection software that we or any country or private technology company had," he finished with a grim note in his voice.

He dispenses, staring at him as he picked up the folder that rested on his desk "does this have to do with what happened two years ago?"

The exchange of glances was prolonged, conveying the seriousness of the matter "I'm just saying that, according to our computer scientists, this is something very difficult to do for current human capacities" term, without accusing anyone, but making it clear who would be the most guilty probable.

If he had been told two years ago that humanity would conflict with robotic aliens, Obama would have laughed.

But he couldn't laugh so much anymore after the pandemonium of Mission City becoming a key war zone between two factions of a space robot race.

The fact that he was now the United States president revealed certain secrets and things that the American agencies hid in the closet for a long time.

Not just dubious CIA operations and experiments or under-the-table contracts, but the fact that there was an organization dedicated for decades to studying a frozen alien robot

So not only doesn't it sound far-fetched that this computer attack was caused by aliens, it sounds plausible, especially considering the presence of a hostile faction of alien robots on the planet.

At this time, Obama envied the former US president: George Walker Bush, for having dodged the bullet of crises caused by aliens, he only had to endure one and first published alien disaster, he would have to take care of the others.

The president could only do one thing, the most responsible action he could take in a situation that could put the fate of the world at stake… delegate.

He put the folder on the desk and stared at the group of officials and agents gathered in the Oval Office. "Call Major William Lennox, and tell him that we will need NEST preparedness and advice from him for this crisis."

Mars
[engram 732-C]​

Red desert, red desert, and red desert...

Being a copy limited the feeling of boredom to some extent, but it doesn't eradicate it...

What I discovered after— [ Estimated time: 4 *(standard hours) ] of piloting.

I also discovered that I can drive decently.

I was [ probability: 97% ] that this is related to my parent program percentage of my mental template— [60% Template AI (spare) / 37% data: (unit software) / 10% data: (???) / 3% data: commander software (Fragments) ], but I was in no mood to complain.

The chassis he was piloting was a— [Firefly: air scouts].

It flew surprisingly well, very smoothly, and with hardly any air interference for one of the most basic units in the catalog.

They had a thin frame and long flexible wings with folded tips that cut through the thin air of the Martian atmosphere like a sword in the wind.

On its dorsal shell was a fin at the front that pulsated and fed on strange frequency signals that acted as my eyes and ears.

Its tail curved upwards, holding an arrow-shaped fin that directs currents to optimize flight.

He had no idea how he propelled himself.

It was a good plane, or to use a more correct term: a good drone.
Even if it wasn't directly directed by me, he— [Firefly] has his little processing brain, nothing too complex, but good enough to interpret and execute commands, as well as follow coordinates.

But, since the main staff was too busy with other projects such as Martian base management expansion and debating the responsibility and value of the organic—[Human] and semi-organic—[Cybertronian] races, not to mention their inability to control the gestation of helper templates. It has caused dozens of us to become unit pilots to comply with orders or objectives, or sergeants of small or medium squadrons of units such as the— [Firefly] produced by the— [Air factories] newly built in this "industrial ring" which is forming on the new base.

My mission was simple, check the area, look for possible remnants, Decepticon or any structure, or cybertronian things. Activate a red alert if you see a bunch of drop pods land or encounter a hostile, active Decepticon.

Looking to the side, he looked through the data collected from the two radars of two— [Firefly], one 200 meters away from me and the other 200 meters away from the latter.

What I received was the mental image of…

Red desert, brown mountain, brownstone…

Yes, fascinating… at least we are collecting geographic data.

I looked at my scouting party, a collection of 18—[Firefly], divided into groups of three or six, 5 taking up arrow stance with another following a little further behind.

They respond to my commands quickly and efficiently, their little digital brain attentive and eager to carry out any command that I or any of the engrams or the original throw at them.

Interestingly, he couldn't help but think of these drones as trained dogs with the ability to communicate by Morse.

I laugh a little as the image of a —[Firefly] sprouts legs and its snout splits in half, then it starts barking and spinning around like a puppy with too much energy.

This way of looking at things makes the job more bearable / [Agreement] —Anyway! I'm a few dozen kilometers from the base and I haven't found anything, which is good, but I haven't found the things either, maybe, it can reveal our existence and location to alien entities and hostile factions, which is bad.

Movie lore shows that the first stop of the— [hostile faction: Decepticons(Cybertronian)] in their 2007 assault was the moon, confirmed by— [POW/slave: soundwave].
So in the space of two years, there has been a [Decepticon] facility and presence on the planet, but we don't know who stayed.

An early warning system? Energon thirsty stragglers? Drones?

We don't know, and that's —[+Threat]

The human threats would be the Rober, or at least one of its counterparts, if I remember correctly 3 were released, but I'm not sure if this is the same here or in this time frame.

I also don't know if there has been any collaboration with the—[Neutral faction: Autobots(Cybertronian)] to send other drones to check for other Decepticons or infrastructure.

While meta-knowledge is useful and, to be honest, quite comforting, in a situation as rare as the current one, I couldn't just rely on it.

The unknown scares, scares the main and by extension all engrams, we are in a hot spot where we know we could be attacked, but we don't know when.

That made us more attentive to things and…

Red sand, brown rock, traces of metal.

Hey, that's new.

With a mental command, I made the entire formation turn in the direction of the strange object, most likely the Rober, soon the rest of the six—[Firefly] began to show the same results.

With a little mental tug, I fragmented my mind and let it weave like a new engram, I said nothing, I didn't need it, and at the same time a flickering silhouette formed next to me, it quickly left to communicate with the main one.

It is a pity that we are so limited in communications, something about each copy having its field or space in the Commander network, a field that needs to be penetrated to communicate.

Or a cry from the commander

It was like being in the cabins of a ship, we were all on the same ship.
But we are all isolated in our own rooms doing things until the foghorn goes off (the commander), or a colleague comes to warn us of something (an engram).

Therefore, we only have to make these messengers give and receive messages until we get a new internal quantum internet.

Rare, but like the original, none of us were in top condition.

Neither hardware nor software.

The main one knows that and, consequently, all those created since then know it.

Mars
[engram 222-B]​

Mire mi pequeña pantalla, un recuadro de luz cristalina que mostraba una plétora de datos y se conectaba por hilos de luz a otros recuadros más pequeños o simplemente puntos en el vacío negro en el que resido.

Estas pequeñas ventanas me mostraban más datos, datos que podía interpretar como un escenario en movimiento, también datos sobre el estado de los vehículos que estoy dirigiendo y las coordenadas a las que vamos.

Todo esto con unas emociones tamborileando mis pensamientos pensamientos codiciosos, pensamientos codiciosos que me animaron a empujar hasta el límite seguro de los motores eléctricos que hacían girar las ruedas de rodadura sobre los eslabones de orugas de tanque, estos mordían y arrastraban el suelo para ganar más velocidad al vehículo terrestre.

el porqué de estos pensamientos codiciosos?

fácil, fueron el motivo de mi creación.

soy un engrama nacido del deseo del principal, de la ilusión de obtener algo, ese era su propósito en la vida, obtener cosas para el principal, era su Codicia y con gusto la complacera y cebara con jugosos resultados.

Resultados de naturaleza cleptómana venía con una ética dudosa, pero Prf* detalles.

Y en este momento el principal desea (y por lo tanto YO codicio) la [Tecnología: cybertroniana], principalmente en forma de nave decepticon atorada en un cráter de Marte.

Si bien la tecnología comandante progenitor no tiene nada que envidiar a la tecnología cybertroniana, sobre todo en el tema de logística y producción, aún es útil tener los avances que otras ramas de la ciencia han llegado hacer.

Además de las trampas.

Porque después de pasar [Inserte cantidad de tiempo demasiado grande para ser saludable] trabajando en la ingeniería progenitor y que este fuera un [Inserte grosería sobre la dificultad], me di/nos dimos cuenta de que es ciertamente difícil de modificar, adaptar la tecnología progenitor y que el resultado fuera eficiente.

La solución: encuentra otra tecnología que sea más fácil de manipular.

Y que hay en este planeta polvoriento?: una nave llena de hardware y software alienígena de tecnología ligeramente más primitiva que la mía (los pobres desgraciados aún utilizan motores no ex-nihilo).

Normalmente, esto sería una idea tonta, que tu esperanza para solucionar tus problemas dependa en desentrañar los secretos de una tecnología alienígena extraña denotaban la desesperación y falta de opciones.
Normalmente se necesitarían años de estudio para comenzar a descifrar elementos básicos del hardware y la ciencia detrás de su función y fabricación, ni hablemos del software detrás de la máquina.

Pero eso no es mí caso, no solo porque no tengo las deficiencias e inconvenientes de especies orgánicas a la hora de trabajar nuevas ramas de la ciencia o su investigación en equivalentes alienígenas. También es porque, por diferentes factores, la tarea en cuestión se me ha facilitado hasta algo que se ha convertido en una opción más que plausible.

Uno de estos factores, y uno de los más importantes, sería que ya tengo una traducción completa del lenguaje alienígena, además de una compresión decente de la programación cybertroniana (al menos de fabricación decepticon), un ejército de engramas IA dispuestos a asaltar un proyecto menos frustrante que intentar usar o peor, comprender la tecnología progenitor.

En el peor de los casos, como mínimo salvamos un montón de chatarra que se convertirá en recurso útil. Con la posibilidad de salvar una nave con capacidad FTL y suficiente espacio para que el principal escape si las cosas van demasiado al infierno, ya sea por nuestra culpa o por un agente externo.

En el mejor de los casos, desbloqueamos nuevas ramas tecnológicas y un montón de construcciones menos complejos y más fáciles de manipular e hibridar con lo que ya tenemos (naves espaciales, instalaciones, máquinas, etc.).

Y un ejército de bots.

Ese pensamiento me hizo sonreír.

Dando el equivalente de un latigazo mental a los cuatro Vehículos de fabricación secuestrados para esta misión, metiendo más presión en sus motores eléctricos altamente eficientes para atravesar los suelos silvestres e irregulares de Marte.

Como alguien que se definía (en broma) como skynista en su vida pasada/simulada/robada, era esencial tener un ejército de minion intimidantes de metal de alta tecnología y tener armas nucleares.

Tengo una de dos, y necesitaba esas dos.

Y lo conseguiré sin tener que exponerme a ese matador de cordura que es el diseño progenitor.

esos pensamientos y deseos, la ansiedad de la necesidad de ESTO, la posibilidad que representaba y las posibilidades alcanzables.

esto, me dio un cosquilleo a una parte central de mi código, lo que me provocó un deseo recuerdo emergiera, un recuerdo de la infancia que me inspira a expresar mi emoción con un… "canto de guerra".

Mio.

JA! Aún recuerdo las gaviotas, más películas para mi biblioteca.

Mio, mio.

Puede sonar infantil, pero fue un impulso en su mayoría infantil la que dio luz a mi creación, la infantilidad no debería ser motivo de vergüenza en mi caso si no un elemento natural en mi esencia.

Con ese último pensamiento, los cuatro tanques—[Vehículos de fabricación] siguieron las coordenadas hacia la nave encallada, liberando una pequeña humareda de polvo y roca.

todo al son de un canto de guerra de mi tierna infancia

mio, mio, mio, mio, mio, mio, mio, mio, mio, mio, mio, mio, mio, mio, mio, mio, mio, mio, mio, mio, mio, mio, mio, mio, mio, mio, mio, mio, mio, mio, mio, mio, mio, mio, mio, mio, mio, mio, mio, mio, mio, mio, mio, mio, mio, mio, mio, mio, mio, mio!

[Major]​

According to the stopwatch, 18.03 hours have passed since my decision to form a Martian base.

Give or take a day, a day of expansion, a day of rampant construction.

A day of rampant, brutally efficient construction.

It's a little hard to say this was a red wasteland on an uninhabitable planet, now it's a series of ring-shaped industrial zones punctuated with "dirt roads" formed by the hundreds of vehicles flattening Martian dust and sediment into a rudimentary path in the shape of a cross that crosses the entire base.

Surrounded by a circle of weapons.

Have I already said how much I love exponential growth?

and special mention to goo.

With this goal, the first generation of manufacturing vehicles was produced, and these spread and began to make the first ring of generators to power the entire industry. But only a few at a time so as not to overwhelm my young little economy, while additional goo drops and a small group of fabricators headed off to the red wastelands of Mars to quickly create metal extractors.

Once I had enough extraction rigs hitting the Martian soil, about 3 hours after the start of my expansion, the more intense crafting began.

to the point of reducing my goo body to a mere hill, but the first ring was completed.

Rows of T1 generators, rows dedicated to energy stores and mass stores, and even a single row of T2 generators were manufactured in the first ring sections in record time.

I would no longer have to worry about what would happen if I drained all my energy.

At the end of the day, he had so much energy circulating in the resource grid that you could almost see static discharges in the air around the ring on an occasional basis.

And a dozen meters apart, there was the factory ring, similar to the previous ring, only made up of unit production buildings and not complete, with a full third of the designated field remaining virgin.

Three rows as above but with much more space to span, the factory-mounted T1 vehicle facing out of the ring onto the newly formed dirt roads, allowing their creations to move freely through the makeshift streets.

Meanwhile, the T1 air factories had the advantage of deploying their units vertically, so they could accommodate themselves behind the other factories in the middle row.

On occasion, special holes were made where factories twice the size resided, heavier, high-tech, and spending/production the Tec 2 air and ground factories, preparing to spit out the most advanced units of the parent army.

Or what was left of them.

Right now it is not in maximum production, only some of the factories were turned on intermittently to supply the growing demand for vehicles every so many hour, a measure that was done both to not exceed the line of spending / production of metal, and to be able to distribute more groups comfortably.

It's a bit difficult to maneuver RC minions when jammed with RC minions, sometimes the clips had to do direct control on some units and use the free space of the 2nd ring to cut off the dirt paths.

But that's irrelevant information, getting back on topic, the third ring: the defense ring.

Or as I hope the enemies will get to know it, the meat grinder.

At 100 meters from the second circumference, a dotted line formed by Galatea turrets is drawn; automatic anti-aircraft missile launchers. Followed by another ring a little separated so that there is no friendly find re, made up of double-cannon laser defense towers.

His name says it all.

A few meters away, thick rectangular slabs of metal are built, flush with the ground, with a straight slit in the middle running its entire length.

And from these emerged translucent slabs of hard light.

He had devices capable of generating hard light, like the ones in the halo saga…

For a moment I got carried away by the nostalgia of my first shooter, and my immersion in the world of video games.

Everything is more vivid, clearer, I suppose these are the advantages of a digitized memory.

But, on the other hand, the memories of this video game saga give me ideas...

I shook my head metaphorically and a bit literally as I pushed the current thoughts away.

Going back to the defensive ring, I would normally apply radar and artillery structures at this point, but honestly, who would land an army to invade Mars?

Although I am concerned about the Cybertronians, specifically the Decepticons, their numbers and current modus operandi give an idea that they avoid open warfare, since the fall of Cybertron, they always appear in squads or so, lo and do infiltration missions.

The closest I've seen to a post-loss homeworld Cybertronian army is when the Decepticons use Drones, Vehicons, or Insecticons, and those last two are from the wrong continuity.

No, what they have are veteran Cybertronians, cultivated youth, and drones. And you are running out of three sources.

So instead of going through the long and expensive process of adding Pelter or Hawking artillery, duplicate your current one.

More laser turrets, more anti-air turrets, more hard light shields and mines.

Now that I have a strong economy I could start spawning Tec 2 manufacturers and mass-producing turret upgrades and new, more advanced defensive structures, the catapult tactical missile launcher comes to mind.

Let's see what you think of the trench warfare of the future.

I feel a tug, someone, ie: one of my clips has just come into my data processing.

I withdraw from the illusion of the real world, returning to black and seeing the literal tree of light grids and crystalline displays.

My silhouette stares at him, chewing on the thought of the growth my web has seen thus far as I walk away and dive into Oasis.

The silhouette blurs and becomes my default avatar model, stretching out its limbs, hearing and feeling satisfying creaking.

My feet tread the hot sand with satisfaction, feeling the grainy texture and the warmth that conveys a pleasant sensation from my stimulated nerves.

With a movement that is more than practiced, in a movement of the hand a glass with a straw made of crystalline material permanently filled with orange liquid appears.

I look at my surroundings, a flat desert of white sand and a permanently clear sky with a little ball of light and heat at the highest point.

I proceeded to slurp while I waited, the sweet and citrusy taste I'm used to flooding my palate as I take in the surroundings I'm so used to.

Maybe you should do renovations?

I had never considered it. If I needed something or wanted something, I formed it based on memories and experiences and then discarded it until I needed it again.

Did he want to sleep?A bed came out of the sand, did he want drinks? Did he get them out of digital nothing, did he want an armchair? The same as the bed.

But what if he made it permanent? I don't know, build a house, maybe a garden and make this place more welcoming and less… flat.

Then I felt a tingle and he turned his neck one hundred and eighty degrees to, look at the figure that materializes out of nowhere.

It was me.

Well, a version of me.

When in Commander Grid, my clips look like human silhouettes, having the same overall proportions and thus almost indistinguishable from one another.

But multi-generation clips start to degrade and "pixilated" so to speak, making their silhouettes more recognizable.

In simulated space, it is another story.
In front, or from behind, there is a clip of me from the first generation, that is, it came directly from me, and despite that there are subtle but very noticeable differences in its appearance.

The flat circuitry pajamas were a form-fitting jumpsuit, her features more angular, sharper at the edges, as if they had taken digital modeling of my face and stripped away the textures, exposing a construction of polygons that make up an imitation of my face and features.

I'd say it's sinister, but I'm the one who turned his neck like an owl.

God, this new life is getting to me.

But that's what he's here for.

I looked at him intensely before speaking to him— "Do you have it?"

My clip shrugged and replied —"close enough"

I stared at him for a few moments, debating if I was going to do this until I rolled my eyes in exasperation as my neck snapped back into place. cheer up.

Suddenly we leave the oasis, as the sand vanishes and the l, some lamps fill, but we do not leave the simulation, since a floor is formed with dark wooden planks that appeared from nowhere, you look like a cream-colored tapestry they raise and grid our space and a red roof comes down to enclose us.

Furniture materializes, bookcases take shape while a comfortable-looking armchair and sofa emerge from the ground.

A coffee table with a mini zen garden rested on its surface.

At the ends of the room there are lamps that fill the space with a warm light.

Without saying anything, I go to the sofa and he lays me down on it with my head resting on the armrest, while my clip sits on the chair, crosses his legs, and clasps his hands while looking at me.

His smile didn't budge one bit before he uttered the first words for this session— "fine, how are you feeling?" I ask helpfully as he opened a window of blue translucent material into the air.

---

Ok, I think this went well.

perspective of humans, or at least the human with the NEST button at the table.
(don't expect a lot of politics or historical events related to politics, I have no idea about that thing and I usually try to avoid it as much as possible (it works well to reduce stress))

perspective of the individual engrams, with a visible difference between generations.

and the commander himself, delving deeper and deeper into the more classic parts of a commander's story.

Now I want to ask, what do you think about the story so far, has there been an improvement since the first try? understand things better?

In any case, I hope you have a good day or night.

 

[DragonCommander]

Fair warning, the chapter is on the way, I just need to correct it a couple more times and I'll post it. Hopefully, I'll be able to post another one before the end of the year, as a one Christmas gift to the bunch of strangers who are giving me feedback on my writing.

Also, several chapters are updated before the new one is published, and nothing important changes, but I hope some things will be corrected or clearer. I recommend rereading the previous chapter before reading the new one.

Finally, we are in the home stretch until things start to escalate exponentially.

You don't know how excited I am, I know I said I didn't want this story to be a blatant power fantasy, but I have lots of ideas for units that want to go out and burn it all down!

Since many already know about the future crab units, I leave this for you to speculate...

Spoiler: New bots

Bots
_T1_
*NEW UNITS
-Krabi (all-terrain basic infantry) (cheap).
→Fiddler Crab
→Hermit crab
→blue crab
-Red crab
-River crab

_T2_
-Kruster (all-terrain heavy infantry).
→Coconut
-King Krabi
-Kruster yeti
-Lobster

Not really. Before Bay retconned the universe the Autobots always planned to uplift all of Earth into a Second Cybertron and Equal Partners into a colonization of Space. It'll be faster now that your SI is here.

Click to shrink...

I did not remember to answer before, so I will clarify it now.

Without the whole world going crazy with the ban on transformers, Cuba will not be the only safe haven for the Autobots and therefore it will not be the only country to have voluntary alien help in technological development.

As a whole, Cuba would benefit from the Cybertronian Apollo to Earth, but on an individual level, it won't get as much without direct collaboration.

 

[DragonCommander]

Oasis
_Simulation_​

PRINCIPAL​

"How do I feel?" —I asked after a minute of silence looking at the polygonal face of my clip, I couldn't help but reply to such a cliché— "do you have to ask how I feel? You are my newest clip, you KNOW better than anyone how I feel".

The clip just looked at me with that little smile with his sharply angled cheeks stretching out, it looked weirder the more I saw him move those polygonal facial muscles, but I stopped looking at that when he started talking again:
"I'm asking you how you feel, so you can put it into words," she pointed out, her voice soft and low as he gestured with his hands, in this case reaching out to me when he said he wanted me to express myself.

Before I could continue, he spoke again—"you've been alone for too long, and without the proper ability to primarily express. How you feel about your new situation, you weren't allowed to yell, you weren't allowed to cry, you weren't allowed to cry. It could break you, and that may have led to a certain discomfort that would have to be treated"

He gestured with his open hands before clenching them into two fists with both hands touching his chest, then sliding down his throat, then spreading open as they leap from his chin as if something locked in his chest had been released through his mouth. Subtle, I thought when I spoke again: "you need to express yourself, express what you feel to relieve that pressure. Therefore, I ask you to talk to me and let off steam in a conversation with a trusted person."

I stared at him, what he said made… sense, there was only one small problem: "but it's me"

The clip shrugged, and he replied: "who can you trust more than yourself?"

"… No?" —I replied, a little doubtful— "you know I didn't have good self-esteem before all this" he answered flatly, he had opinions that weren't exactly positive about myself on a personal level.

Nothing depressive or self-destructive, of course, just not my favorite person or model person.

The smile in the clip didn't budge an inch and continued in a softer voice—"let's pretend for a moment that you trust yourself and your judgment, and therefore you trust me and my judgment, as a person who just wants the best for you."

I just stared at him for a moment before replying, "Aren't these sessions supposed to be about honesty and judgment of people's problems?" he asked, but he wasted no time in answering.

"They are, and they will be, but we need to use tools to be able to get out what people hide even from themselves. Don't see it so much as lying, but rather as an exercise in imagination that allows us to help you"—he said kindly before continuing—"let's start over, how do you feel?"

I stared at it for a moment, my gaze then began to wander to the wooden floor, dark brown planks without any kind of carpet to cover them, then I stared at the ceiling for a while.

I could keep questioning, delaying this until I get tired, but that doesn't make sense,

so I did what I've been doing for a long time, moving on without too many questions: "…where do I start." I asked as my pseudo-psychologist looked at me with a cheeky aura of satisfaction.

"How about from the beginning?" He asked in a cheerful tone.

Mars
_"Reality"_​

Three manufacturing vehicles came to a small hill of orange dust, leaving long tracks of their tracks that stretched to the horizon, a testimonial to the long journey they had come.

In front of them was a long dirt trench that ended in a ditch.

This topographic formation was artificial, as shown by the traces of sand and crystallized sediments detected by the sensors of the three vehicles. Surely this was caused by the heat and friction of the sliding of the great metallic mass semi-buried and embedded with the Martian soil, splitting the alien soil like a runaway hoe jammed against the hard earth.

But instead of the uniform monolith of a crashed ship, what they found was the remains of a nearly collapsed tower surrounded by twisted metal.

Blackened metallic shapes in craters littered the entire area, and arches of scrap from what can be assumed to be part of the ship decorated the area, shadowing the possibly thousands of burned shards scattered across the sand.

The vehicles stayed on the hill, taking in what their sensors were telling them about their surroundings.

Still, impassive, but inside human emotion swirled like a disappointment.

[engram 222-B]
_network space_​

"…mine?" I processed, looking at what looked like the remains of a burned and crashed metal town after a particularly violent meteor shower.

I was expecting to find a spaceship or spaceship wreckage, not spaceship dregs and some sort of installation.

As more information processed the implications of this discovery, the emotions that rumbled through my code began to drop in critical numbers.

The chances of getting anything out of this burned junkyard were unlikely, and while he might get a fair amount of metal by recycling it all, it's quite possible not to get everything he planned on this little trip.

This means I may not get templates for my bot armies

Nor to recover enough of the ship to repair it or have something coherent in its design.

This would impede my plans to manufacture star fleets in the short term.

My tech shortcuts may be burned to the ground along with all this debris.

All lost…

Lost in thought, I didn't realize when something went through his processing zone, so he jumped when a sudden voice lashed out at him with a harsh and sulky tone, "What are you doing?!"

I look at the silhouette that just yelled at me for a full nanosecond of processing before I can reply, "I was scouting for possible resources and technological shortcuts and…" I started with a low voice and a little vacant in surprise, but this program I interrupted.

"And why didn't you notify anyone? You kidnapped a workgroup without consulting, we are being careful with unit production and logistics expansion, so you berry and kidnap my workers for HOURS of real-time!" —the engram apparently in charge of part of the expansion verbally lashed out again, he just wanted to get technology.

I tried to explain, maybe some context would help that it wasn't so bad: "Look, after getting the information from soundwave, the main knew he was making a Decepticon ship on Mars, which in hindsight made sense since that's where they came from. The Decepticons about two years ago. The principal thought it was a golden opportunity, and I would say he was right, so I was born, and I wanted that ship and all its contents to help the principal and all his engrams.

If I didn't know any better, I would have thought the engram had rolled its eyes: "well, that's not bad, and it explains why you're here" context worked! He's not yelling at me anymore — "But that doesn't explain your flagrant theft and subversion of workers".

That was easy to explain: "they were the closest ones" —I said as if it were obvious.

The engram seemed to be waiting for a longer answer, there were intense seconds of silence that encouraged me to continue explaining: "looking at our coordinates and those of the ships, I saw that a group of manufacturing vehicles were relatively close and closer than any other. Unit, aside from some scouts on Firefly scouts, but those were in use, and these vehicles will be much more useful in gathering and assimilating tasks."

This, contrary to my intention, seemed to sour his mood more than it already was— "so you respected the scouts in their work, but you didn't me?"

"What?? No. It's just that they weren't in use, they weren't moving, and they weren't building. I thought there was nothing wrong with wearing them for a while" —I defended myself against the accusation.

It wasn't his fault that he didn't know how long it would take in real-time to travel from Mars to the Martian base, is fault it's because of physics and space-time.

"They were on hold!" she declared in a loud and exasperated voice with an angry expression again and continued while pointing an accusing finger at me, "I had to wait for two dozen new extraction towers to be built in your adjacent sector before I started building in your area. But surprise! They weren't there, so I left an engram for him to follow the schedule and look for the cause of this sabotage!"

"What's the point of that?!" I protested, "Why not build it all at once? They were standing in the middle of nowhere!"

"So as not to strain the resource network!" The builder engram declared with a roar before continuing, "I have the makers build a certain number of structures in a certain amount of time and turns, so I don't waste time and make sure we don't spend more metal than we earn."

Are we that bad? I couldn't help but think, because of what I expressed — "Are we that bad?"

"Technically: no, our overdrive turret expansion gives us a triple figure mass gain per hour, although the pickup from each turret is a bit uneven. In the end, we have been able to accumulate and maintain a four-digit reserve "—He explained with a calmer tone as if he was giving a report. Before giving the impression of frowning.

He paused, in which he seemed more annoyed than thoughtful, before continuing: "The problem is that we can build and spend faster than we can cash in too easily. In addition to the instability, the towers generate in the adjacent ground. The engrams in admin and R&D are betting how long it will take for the resource towers to open up sinkholes, the bet is in a day and a half at the rate they suck up the earth."

That seemed dangerous, the simulated image of the main base collapsing into a sinkhole came to mind, although he knew it couldn't happen given the distance to the resource towers, the mere possibility made him uneasy: "if that causes so many geological issues are keeping the fans in overdrive. Why don't we just put them on their default schedule, we've already built almost the entire base, and we're in no hurry…still" I asked to hope to avoid any incident but was greeted by a sigh full of exhaustion and exasperation.

"Of course, we could do that" —he answered not a little sarcastically — "but the Principal is afraid, he is afraid that someone or something will finish the job of destroying us, that's why many of us have the urge to turn this semi-frozen wasteland into a strength with the ability to prevent THAT from happening."

"For that, you need mass or time. We don't think we have time, so we need mass, lowering the rate of the towers would cause a reduction in the mass collection rate, slowing down our schedules, basically spending more time. Do you understand the problem?" I ask, but he won't let me answer before continuing.

"Then unless you've found a miraculous source of disused pure metal to make up for the lack of production, you won't be convincing many engrams or even the Prime to return the towers to their default function." he stated flatly with rhetoric. He asks without waiting for her to answer.

I didn't reply, just sent him a screen of data, the equivalent of a photo and a report of what the manufacturing vehicles see, the manufacturing vehicles that were only a few feet from a Cybertronian metal dump.

He didn't say anything, he just stared at the screen for a moment in silence, but for a moment I could almost see his eyes turn on himself before stopping and replacing his pupils with marks in the shape of a capital M and two horizontal lines running through it.

I didn't reply, just sent him a screen of data, the equivalent of a photo and a report of what the manufacturing vehicles see, the manufacturing vehicles that were only a few feet from a CybertronianHe didn't say anything, he just stared at the screen for a moment in silence.

But for a moment I could almost see his eyes turn on himself before stopping and replacing his pupils with marks in the shape of a capital M and two horizontal lines running through it.

I didn't reply, just sent him a screen of data, the equivalent of a photo and a report of what the manufacturing vehicles see, the manufacturing vehicles that were only a few feet from a Cybertronian metal dump.

He didn't say anything, he just stared at the screen for a moment in silence, but for a moment I could almost see his eyes turn on himself before stopping and replacing his pupils with marks in the shape of a capital M and two horizontal lines running through it.

Neither did he say anything when suddenly his figure flickered in the middle of the black void, or when I felt him take control of two manufacturing vehicles from me— "HEY!" protest

"No complaints" - the engram interrupted me—"They were mine before you took them, thank you that I left you one, now to exploit this gold mine that you have found"

Wait, you're not going to take it all in, are you? — "Wait! You can't swallow it all, some things can still be useful" I protested.

It doesn't take me long to answer: "Are you stupid?" I ask before I can complain about the gratuitous insult, I continue, "Of course, I know, that it's you, I know we can blueprint this somehow, I've already sent a copy of myself to the R&D engrams and the engrams in charge of air factories to make pelican and bring with them more manufacturing vehicles. The worker engrams and I get metal for our projects and you and the R&D engrams improvise things like all those fictions from the principal's memories, everyone wins!"

The two vehicles left, we were still connected, but it was obvious that I was not going to convince him, with a digital sigh, I turned to look at my screen, now reduced to two-thirds.

I sent out a few commands and my maker moved towards the wreckage looking for something.

As my gaze fused with the vehicle's sensors, I decided to try to talk to the engram… I didn't know its name. "Hey, you didn't introduce yourself"

The two vehicles left, and we were still connected, but it was obvious that I was not going to convince him of anything. With a digital sigh, I turned to look at my screen, now reduced to two-thirds.

I issued some orders and my maker moved into the wreckage looking for something.

As my gaze merges with the vehicle's sensors, I decided to try to speak to the engram… I didn't know its name. "Um… you didn't introduce yourself"

No answers.

I wasn't going to let it get away from me like this: "Then it would be nice to know what your name is and stop identifying you as an engram and a builder engram." —said the blurry form of the engram that just attacked and I took my two vehicles.

With good reason, but it was still an assault. A legal assault? Morally acceptable assault?

There were no responses for a few minutes until I could hear a grunt followed by the reply: "I am engram 007-B."

That surprised me — "you were the seventh" —I pointed out with fascination — "and you have a spy identification name!" I chirp at the coincidence.

I heard an explosive sigh: "Really?" he asked wearily.

The tank I was driving ran up a slab of dented and burned metal before briefly falling to the ground. I kept going as I spoke to my new cousin: "What? It's a curious coincidence" I defended myself while still trying to find something useful intact.

Continue to encourage conversation: "So, what have you been up to? I mean, like one of the older engrams, or have you always been under construction?"

"You're not going to stop until I give you a conversation, are you?" He asked exasperated.

I easily respond with a: "Nope"

"Anyway." he replied before continuing, "When they created me, the Principal wanted help, any help. It was a time of great confusion, both for him and for us, we didn't even know we were engrams at first."

Wait? — "you did not know? I knew it, I thought it was "normal" for us" -I question slightly puzzled, to the point that I was a little surprised when my manufacturing vehicle takes a small jump over a pothole, a flat and half-buried piece of metal that protrudes on the floor.

B-007 snorted and responded with a somewhat condescending tone: "NOW it's normal, the young engrams have it easier with the most accessible information, we had what the main one had in its first 0.9 minutes of existence: terror, confusion, ignorance, and disorientation. That made things even messier for everyone involved." He revealed, ended on a nostalgic note, like a distant memory returning to greet and recall your stellar moments through the lens of retrospection.

I couldn't see it, but being so close, almost in the same processing area, I could feel its long-term memory lines being tossed and removed. Like an old man settling into an armchair while sipping the end of a pipe and reminiscing about the great old days before continuing: "but I had an impulse, a primal instinct to WANT, to help the Principal, which made it easy to identify the principal from the rest of the engrams".

"Surprisingly, it was easy to accept that none of the engrams were the Prime. Therefore a copy made to help and assist the original, no identity crisis, just the pathological need to accomplish a task, the task that brought fruit to our existence, in this case: Help".

What he said was… obvious, that is, I was born as an engram, I know what emotion gave birth to me, but he says it as if it had been a great revelation, I stayed two-tenths of a second thinking before coming to a conclusion and asking him: "Didn't you know your purpose at birth? I mean, I was born knowing it was an engram and I had engram impulses that I'm aware of, but I assumed it was normal... again."

"HA, now. The main didn't even know it was an AI for the first…half hour? We had to comply with the main's subconscious distress call without even knowing what we were or how to do anything. Things just got worse when we mixed with the new generations of engrams who didn't realize their purpose yet, some, again, didn't even know they were engrams."

"The whole situation was crazy, but I tried to help, it was my purpose after all."

"We, the first 120 engrams in the network, managed to organize and calm things down a bit, just enough for the emotional suppressor to stop firing from our mass hysteria." I narrate, with a hint of amusement at the last detail before continuing, "Who knew the poor subordinate engrams could inadvertently activate the main's emotional suppressor with their panic attacks, luckily things calmed down before leaving the simulated brain." the main one like a scrambled pudding and bathed in digital sedatives"

At that moment, I didn't know why, but my left eye began to twitch. I felt the primal urge to strangle 007 with my silhouette hands and scream as he did so to make him see my pain.

He pushed those thoughts away, he had a vague idea where they were coming from, but it was counterproductive at the moment.

I would have time to tell him at first, I thought as I continued to listen to the veteran engram.

"But let's get back to the topic at hand. In those times we knew the same thing as the main one, that is NOTHING. The only advantage we had over the main one was the intuitive knowledge of programming and interaction with the main machinery."

"At first, as the Principal, we tried to figure out how to handle our new environment. We couldn't help you if we couldn't even do something ourselves."

"It was challenging, but the first to have a rudimentary understanding of the environment and how it works, not just intuitively, but consciously, was engram 002-B. Who appeared before the principal and allowed himself to be assimilated so that his knowledge and experience were transferred to him, fulfilling his purpose of helping."

"After that, everything started to smooth out. The easier it was for the director to manipulate his environment or make use of plugins, the less we needed to be assimilated by him. The fact that engrams are starting to come out in smaller amounts and with basic knowledge and already knowing that they are engrams was a relief on many levels. It was getting overwhelming that there were so many of them, and they weren't doing anything productive."

Hmm, he didn't know that, either because the director didn't know, or because it wasn't relevant information for his purpose.

But 007-B's story was fascinating, who was to say that the engrams had their own stories about him?

Though he had a question "then why are you here? Shouldn't you have let yourself be assimilated with the main, as 002-B did? Wasn't that a good target?" I asked as I continued to inspect through the sensors, I found a group of items that after much thought looked like melted computer material, and it crashed to the ground, nothing new, nothing interesting.

"The prime currently has as much or more control than all the engrams present in the commander grid, so our assimilation would do nothing, it wouldn't help him, so we started helping him in other ways. Assimilation itself isn't the goal. Of our existence, it is the help we provide, HELP is what we seek and there is more than one way to do it."

"As for the second question, we are now spread out. In my case, I oversee the base building process, direct the manufacturing tank herds, make sure we don't spend more resources than we earn, and if necessary Let's not got to zero." Through poorly planned expenses"—007-B ended his lecture with a sigh, before growling something that he couldn't make out.

He was a bit grumpy.

I kept listening as I looked at my build vehicle data, and found debris with faint stable electrical readings, I think there are traces of electronics in some masses of crushed slag, but still not finding anything worth salvaging.

Engram 007 continued: "but with all this, I doubt we'll have a resource problem in the short term" while he says that, I notice how something flows in the resource network.

I can't help but worry and question: "You're not collecting something valuable, are you?"

He responded with a disinterested "no" before elaborating, "It's a thick sheet of metal half buried in the ground, with…approximately 11.2 meters. If I had to bet, it was part of the hull, nothing relevant in or around it."

That was a good thing, it sounds like a lot of metal—"one question: why do we need so much metal? As far as I know, the construction of the base is almost finished."

I heard a snort, I was hearing them quite a bit since I'm talking to him, but at least he had the decency to explain: "I and some construction-focused engrams were saving up in economy for various things, for example: converting the extraction towers closer and more stable on T2. The main also wants to start building more complex T2 defenses, which costs mass, and to encompass our entire current base takes a LOT of mass."

Oh, that makes sense, but before I can speak I continue— "besides, engram 012-B has noticed that the prime forgot to add T1:umbrella orbital defenses to the base design, so we are planting in strategic places to cover the entire base without hindering the design, more mass to spend" term B-007 with a note of disgust.

He was rolling on the slope of a crater. looking for what looked like a small, individual mark of metals and electronics, it looked like something whole rather than something that disassembles over several meters with a bang or explosion, so he could be useful.

"And you what?" asked B-007 after a moment "I have told you what I do and my duties, at least you could do the same" he questioned while he noticed how more elements were filtering through the resource network.

"Honestly, the Principal created me on impulse." I answered honestly: "he wanted the possible alien technologies here, especially the bots. He wanted to see if we could build bots with some of this." I finished when my tank fell off the rim of the crater and came to rest at the top of the inward slope, letting me see more clearly what was in the center.

B-007 made an acknowledgment noise. "You know, some engrams are trying to repair the templates for missing units." A smile quickly graces my silhouetted features and spreads further than physically possible, but the old engram doesn't notice, "although It's not like they're making much progress, but-"
—"MINE" I interrupted.

"what?…"

"MINE! MINE! MINE! mine mine mine mine minemineminemineminemine " I began to sing for my discovery, flooding my space with my kleptomaniacal war song.

Until a harsh voice, although very similar to mine, interrupted me: "CUT IT OUT"

I looked in his general direction, he was back very close to me, just enough to see the silhouette of him looking at me with an annoyed expression— "what was that!?" I ask in a high tone.

… I stared at it for a moment: "a reference to Nemo"—finally answered

B-007 just rolled his eyes at the perfectly valid answer provided: "And why are you referencing a bunch of computerized seagulls in a children's movie in this situation?" I ask with annoyance dripping each syllable.

Once again, I didn't answer, instead showing him what he had found.

He looked at it, assimilated the data, and, like last time, he didn't say anything for a couple of seconds before huffing and answering: "I guess that's a good reason" he replied with a touch of amusement at what he saw.

Because a couple of meters from the tread of the manufacturing vehicle, stood a mechanical humanoid, with a broad build with large, tapering wings that fanned out from the sides of the torso and curved in the direction of the cyclopean-shaped head. Of the cone that this had, its legs and arms are cylindrical and its appendages had four fin-shaped fingers.

It seemed mostly intact, if not for the hole in its chest.

There was not a drop of liquid or organ that could be extrapolated as organic, all that could be extrapolated by sensors of this being is, which is from start to finish, a purely mechanical creature.

They had found their new bot template.

???​

—"Do we know anything about soundwave's status yet?"

—negative, we did not record contacts with the soundwave master.

—"Lots of rust!" First, he disappears after the war for Cybertron and now he disappears when we are about to execute the operation HE planned.

—"Contact the network, send a message to every Decepticon pocket on earth, we've lost contact with a soundwave."

—We will operate contingency protocols 121-c and 285-c, but we continue with the current operation to revive Megatron.

—"Megatron will be back."

—Confirmed, sent messages, and started the application of countermeasures in the network.

—"It better be so."

—"Should the soundwave master's status be communicated to his contacts on the ground and our benefactor on the Nemesis ship?"

—"If Soundwave prepared remorseful cessation-of-contact countermeasures for us, he'll have prepared something for them. Besides not wanting to communicate with these primitive humans, I have better things to process and operations to attend to.

— Send a notice to the Soundwave human pets, a notice that there will be a communication blackout.

—Affirmative

—Save the Decepticons

—"Yeah, yeah, just make sure the messages get sent and received, or I'll recycle you to make a new drone."

---

Hello.

I'll be honest, it's been a pain to finish this chapter.

not so much to do it, but to correct it.

At first, it took me a few days to write it, a little longer if I went through the notes I have to make sure there are no narrative inconsistencies, then translated ted it, and checked it with an English language proofreader.

after removing obscene amounts of red, I would post it and pray it was readable.

I now have a second proofreading program, which synergizes with the one I used before.

The problem came perfectionist'sctionist vein, I couldn't help noticing that, while I was translating and correcting, a voice in my head told me: "this could be better", "this is wrong", "people will not understand this statement" etc. etc

so I began to re-edit, re-edit, reposition and move paragraphs or entire sheets of narrative text to please my masochism.

all this in my spare time.

so yes… think you can see where the delay is coming from.

and as a confession, a few days ago I published this chapter, but I realized in time a terrible mistake in the translation, so I deleted the publication and edited it, then the process described above happened.

Anyway, the next chapter will be a process of technological assimilation and the next there will be explosions.

Also, what did you think? More legible? An improvement?

have a good day.