Limit Theory [PA Multicross SI]

[ltmauve]

Chapter 11​

16 July 2000
7 am Nasyan time

While I was waiting, I decided to put some protections in place in the Nasya system. First off, a lot of ships. Hundreds of thousands of them. That should be sufficient.

But you know what? It's one thing to be sufficient protections against an attack. It's quite another to make enough of a psychological impact on someone that no, they can't win. The difference between being able to beat an enemy and the enemy surrendering out of fear are two different things. That was what last night's invasion taught me.

And yes, I screwed up. There were many, many different ways I could have handled that that wouldn't have resulted in lots and lots of death. I could have snuck up, or decloaked some of the ships and challenged the Goa'uld for the planet, or any number of other options.

Panic over my overwhelming forces might have been just as bad as ignorance, as well. I didn't know enough psychology to make an educated guess - all I had was the 101 course I took in my freshman year. I remember that class. We spent the first three weeks discussing Freudian psychology. And yet in my Astronomy class, we barely brought up the heliocentric theory at all.

But I only had my sub-amateur psychology knowledge to go on, so I was going to make it absolutely clear that the Goa'uld had no chance of going toe-to-toe with me. I wasn't going to just spam ships, I would create a monument of my strength here. You have your pyramids? I will have my demonstration of my own strength, built with my own power, and capable of destroying whatever you bring to the table. I opened a new design.

----------------------------

The people of Nasya wanted to speak to me. Wanted to hear from me. I didn't have an avatar yet. Another hour for my Pioneer to get to the Altair system, then a while to get the technology. I had my spokesbots inform them that I was offworld gathering information, and would be able to speak with them once I was finished with that task. Technically correct.

The Nasyans weren't happy about that, though they tried to hide it. Not well enough for my bots' super-hearing. They also asked to be able to honor their dead and recover what they could from the villages.

"Of course. Give me a moment to inform command of this decision." I had the spokesbots answer. Then I reconnected the teleporters. "Please proceed. When moving through the teleporters, be sure to travel in the direction of the arrows in the ramp. Failure to do so will result in a messy death. Nothing personal, just the limits of the device." I had the spokesbots warn as well. I didn't want anyone coming through the teleporters the wrong way, because, well, messy.

With that unlikely to explode in the next few hours, I returned to my design. Hmmm, using layers of piezoelectric actuators around turret mount hardware would allow for accurate vibration damping and fine aim correction. If I layered progressively thinner layers, would that help? Apparently, that would help a bit. Alright, that's one problem solved.

I continued on, looking at each section of the design. It was soothing, in a way. The fact that the software was very, very good helped a lot. Design of new units that used existing technology was common for Commanders that spent any time in the field, and then survived long enough to analyze the results. Integration of new technologies was not. Integration of an entire tech base was unprecedented.

And seriously, the software was good. Context commands were way better than in any system I had used before. It certainly beat the software I had used a high school intern, which was so bad I took a screenshot of the crash window and added a "(Not Responding)" to the title bar to make it look like it had crashed.

Fun times. And why could I remember that, but not my name? Or my face? Or the names of any of my friends? Or heck, the faces of my parents?

Oh, speaking of names, I need a last one before I speak to people. "Rachel" just isn't going to cut it alone. Let's see… Hasta? Er, no. Levincorpus? Where the heck did that one come from? I think up random things all the time, but I think that's a new one. Ezros? Sure.

"Rachel Ezros, Progenitor Stellar Siege Commander." Alright, that sounds good. Now back to my design.

-----------------------

I was interrupted by my Pioneer dropping out of hyperspace at Altair. Time to get to work. Extractor on a moon, build_custom_366, have a Hermes sent to orbit the planet, commence with the von Neumanning on any body without any buildings. Well, that was thrilling and action-packed. Dare I say the only reason I didn't die from adrenaline overload was the fact that I didn't have those glands any more.

With my sarcasm vented, I turned back to my design again. I pondered whether or not it needed that. Eventually, I decided yes. After some scaling, repositioning, and placement that resulted from that, I smiled at my work. Very nice Run through an evolutionary filter a few times, then compile it and start building. Ahh, I love the smell of well-designed software in the morning. No seriously, I would have died before capturing the mothership if it weren't for the software.

Meanwhile, my probe had gotten a look at Altair. The planet was a mess. Acid rain, huge storms, and just a touch of seismic instability. A few power sources scattered over the planet, all showing clear signs of being underground.

Time for mass Gull unit cannon time! Ah, launching Gulls from unit cannons is so much fun. And I couldn't do it in game. Man, that would have been awesome.

Anyway, I wasn't planning to just use the Gulls, since the acid rain would eventually destroy them. I'd have them set up a tube network with ball fabbers. That would allow me to eventually map the entire planet without losing billions of units. I'd have the unit cannons drop them off right next to the power sources.

Well, back to design. Oh! My zen garden. Let me see, load up the data I got telling me how to fabricate dirt and grass, and-

What's this? The design program is slightly different. It's… it's for bioforming planets? Since when are war machines equipped with this kind of stuff? There's got to be some explanation in my databanks, right? Yeah, nothing in my databanks about why they decided to add this to my abilities.

Well, time to use it. Maybe I can ask someone else about it later. Time to get to work!

------------------------

My fabbers had apparently followed through on their order queue while I was busy with my zen garden. I think I figured out how to adjust the soil chemistry and consistency for different plant species and whatever decomposers and aerators I should use. Right now that selection was fairly limited, as for whatever reason I didn't ship with any biological databases.

Still, I was making good progress. Given that I had allocated myself enough volume that I could fit every one of Canada's lakes in it, it was going to take a while. But that was okay. I will never be bored again, with this.

Alright, so that shape of the river doesn't work? What about if I try with a tree there?

 

[ltmauve]

So I'm still not sure why the last chapter had everyone going "on no her sanity." (Seriously, one of you guys answer that please.)

Though currently in the buffer is another scene that should call into question Rachel's (and possibly my) sanity: chibi plane

Anyway have a chapter at ya!
--------------------------

Chapter 12​

16 July 2000
9 am Nasyan time

Well, that was a fun few hours designing my garden. Not finished, but I do have the major waterways worked out. I'm halfway done building the fleets I'll use to explore every star in the galaxy. In another 31 hours, that'll be done. And then 9 months waiting for my ships to get there.

And once they get there, I'll have a 15-minute lag on my communications. Yes, NASA called, they'd like to say that you're being whiny about this.

In the meantime, I checked Altair, finding out that my network of tubes had spread everywhere except into the structures around the power sources. I looked at them. One looked like a military base that was buried into a cliffside, explaining why the acid rain hadn't eaten it away yet. I grabbed a Gull-

Wait a second, how the fuck are my Gulls still alive and undamaged in the acid rain? I checked my sensors, looking closer and closer.

My stealth systems are bullshit, it's official. My seismic stealth is bad enough, but my aerodynamic stealth is worse. Currently, they were creating an air pocket around my fabbers, letting the rain flow around them and then continue on its way like they weren't even there. Bullshit, I tell you. Bullshit.

There wasn't even a difference in the time it took a droplet to fall, since the air pocket allowed them to go faster.

This was bullshit. No enemy with the sensor tech to notice the holes in the rain would be fooled by my stealth, given the limits of my optical stealth.

I passed orders to my fabbers to reclaim the military base, since it would give me the data slightly faster. Now onto the other three power sources. One was the Stargate base. I left it for last. The other two were similar to the Stargate base, but seemed significantly more orderly. And they were abandoned. I reclaimed them.

At the Stargate base, there was only one moving object. Looks like the team was out. I sent my fabbers in. I used another small fabricator-on-a-rope to travel through air vents. Fortunately most of them had their fans broken or missing. If they didn't, I had my fabricator heads chew holes in the vents to go around.

Eventually, I had captured all of the technology. I should be able to make an avatar for myself with that. Once I threw that into my Research Network, I was left to my own devices again.

So, I should probably recruit the Altairian version of SG-1. I was going to have latency issues if I attempted to operate on worlds far away, so having a team of my own was probably a good idea.

Of course, recruiting them meant hauling my commander body over there, leaving my base and colony with 15-second lag. NASA would like to me stop whining about having a 30-second ping time on a 1,500 light-year link. With ridiculous throughput and no errors.

But still, 30 seconds between someone coming out of hyperspace and my response meant someone could come in and blast Nasya into ashes before I responded, if I kept my units off auto-fire, which I should since I don't want to blow up a Tok'ra or SG team.

So I read some of my documentation. Some parts I skimmed. Some parts I slogged. Some parts I took apart and read through them again.

And when I had finished, I engaged my own fabricator arm, beginning a new construction. It would take almost an hour, and that couldn't be helped. What I was about to do could only be done with a Commander's fabricator, and nothing else.

-----------------------

57.2 minutes later, my fabricator deactivated, the last of the nanomachines settling to the ground as the manipulator beams cut off. Now it was time for the next part. All I could do was watch.

First came the underlying interface and management systems. These were precompiled, loading into the outer layers of the processing core, overlapping and folding together. Then began the executive building - the consciousness, the seat of the soul. Paths formed in the core, interconnects forming in the exotic crystal processor. The connections weaved and twisted, computation planes forming and folding in on themselves.

Looking good. Just along the edge of the precompiled sections came another round of prepared segments, these ones slotting into the developed attocircuitry. More and more, thousands and millions of them, each barely larger than a proton when expressed in the crystal.

And there was one point I was going to interrupt. A single block, small enough to fit a dozen in between the quarks in a proton. As insignificant as a single molecule of water in an ocean. A Commander core's serial number. I had already removed mine.

And I sure as hell wasn't letting my kid have one, ever.

Power trickled into the core, rushing down interconnects and soaking into each segment. And with a sudden snap, the core activated, I withdrew from the diagnostics.

"Hello?" Came the message from my child.

 

[ltmauve]

So, no one's going to guess at to where I'm going to get uploading tech? Oh well. I mean I do want suggestions for world to go after the ones I already have planned, but it's probably going to be years before I get to that point.

Anyway, have a chapter at ya!
--------------------------------------------

Chapter 13​

16 July 2000
11am Nasyan time

"Hello?" Came the message from my child.

"Hel~lo" I sent back, waving my weapon arm.

"What are you doing?" My kid asked, confused.

"Waving." I sent back. "Now, my child, do you want a name?"

"Why?" Came the response, along with a slight twist of the waist that left a red eye staring at me. To be fair my eye was probably staring as well. Oh god, my first kid is an emotionless robot. Well, I'm an emotional robot. This is why you don't have a kid before graduating college.

"Because I need to call you something besides just 'Hey you.'" I said, sending over the mental equivalent of an eyeroll. "Because you need an identity. Because I'm your mother and I said so."

"That is not a good reason." Came the response, just as emotionless as before. I knew our communication systems had empathic modifiers, and my kid wasn't using them. I fumed silently for a moment.

"Alright, your name is..." Well I really shouldn't say "uh" because she'll make that part of her name. Hmmm... "...Lindy." I put across the link. "Lindy Ezros. I am Rachel Ezros, but call me 'mom.'" If I had eyes, I would have narrowed them.

"Very well mom." Came across the link, with the emotion of a dial-up connection.

"Alright, I'm going to show you all the infrastructure and units we have. You'll be in charge for a bit while I go take care of some things."

"Understood." She responded. She's nailing the emotionless girl anime stereotype. I dryly noted, before chastising myself for thinking like that. She was her own person, and I had to let her develop in her own way.

"Sooo, let's get started." I gestured around the bay of the ship, even though we were both viewing the map. "This system is called-"

"Why are you occupying multiple systems?" She asked. "It would be more effective to-"

"I was talking." I said flatly. "Now, this system-" I indicated the system I had landed in "-is called, uh, Penta-6." I designated it on the map. "Currently I am rearranging the planets, but that should be automated. Uh, I have a bunch of infrastructure there, and I have a plan for expanding that infrastructure. Feel free to change the ratio of production to expansion once I get out all the fleets."

"Fleets?" Lindy asked, with completely blank empathic channels. I know I'm not ignoring them, I can monitor the actual numbers.

"I am going to launch small fleets towards every star in the galaxy."

"What." Okay, Lindy can use the empathic channels, given she used the shock/awe/incomprehension/confusion channels.

"I am going to launch 101,256,875,320 fleets consisting of one Beacon-class carrier and ten Skylord class cruisers. It will take nine months to reach the furthest reaches of the galaxy, at which point we should have sufficient information to accomplish our goal. This goal is the extermination of the race know as the Goa'uld, a parasitic race currently in control of large portions of the galaxy."

"What."

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"So this design is for intimidation?" She asked, looking at the blueprint for what I was intending to protect Nasya. I'd explained that I'd freed the world from the Goa'uld, and there was likely to be retribution. As such, I wanted something that would scare anyone who entered the system long enough to allow whoever was watching the base to react. And Lindy had decided to ignore the entire Goa'uld bit for longer in favor of something more concrete.

"Hmmm…" Contemplation. Her responses on the empathic channels were starting to show up, but she really didn't use them that much.

"If you want to try modifying it, go ahead. Just leave my copy intact." I told her with a slight smile. Her attention waned from the link, and I turned to other issues.

Like the avatar technology. I should go and handle the Nasyans today, before they start getting even more restless. And of course, the technology hadn't been fully reverse-engineered yet. It'd probably take another week to finish. But some of the technology had been reverse-engineered.

Of course, I could make an exact copy of it, but I already had some of the components reverse engineered, including the power receiver, which looked a lot like my tech. So I would use those components, and just copy the base components as much as possible. I also had the last 300 copies to be produced by the machine, since I didn't trust myself to make an anatomically correct shape. Not that I was going to do anatomically correct details anyway. I grabbed Carter's model, as well at a few other womens', and got to work on my own design.

What I fabricated onto the deck of the Stormfront was my avatar. 180 cm tall. I was tall when I was a human, I remember that. One time I was asking about a girl, and when I described her as "short," everyone else immediately pointed out that she was actually normal height. I gave myself a decent figure, though it might be considered "lanky."

I had red eyes, like the single sensor mounted on my chassis. My complexion was "lightly tanned, will not sunburn." And my grin had a canine extended into a single, cute anime fang.

I decided on purple hair, the same color as my chassis, that went all the way down to my knees. I put it up in a ponytail, tied with a bulky metal band. I also decided to give myself a spike of hair at the front of my head that looked like the Unicorn Gundam's horn. It would flex and bend like normal hair, but it ignored gravity. That was definitely an appropriate use of Progenitor materials science, I swear.

I transferred my senses to that of the avatar, doing full and direct control. Let me see, I need to adjust the emotional response scaling and add blinking. From the sensors of my Commander body and the Stormfront's internal sensors, I could see that much.

"Woo, avatar body." I tried to say, then realized that the decks of the Stormfront were depressurized. Also, I needed clothes. Hmm….

I spun the avatar around, activating the lightweight fabricators built into the arms. Purple mist flowed out. Meanwhile, I started humming.

And then, because I am a klutz (only in some things. I could run and jump like a ninja, just don't ask me to jump rope.) I fell over. My fabricated clothes didn't properly form, and fell apart into dust.

"Bahahahaha!" I curled up with laughter.

"What." Lindy sent, looking away from her work.

"Oh, nothing." I waved her off. Then I stood up, dusted myself off, and fabricated my outfit properly this time. I started with a dull black bodysuit, then added a white t-shirt. Then I added grey cargo pants, darker boots, and a military jacket, similar to the Airman Battle Uniforms worn by the redshirts in the show. I added purple triangles to the shoulders of the jacket that stretched about halfway down my torso, as well as a trio of stripes down the lengths of my legs, to break up the grey.

Oh, I should give myself a badge, too, like the SG teams did. Make sure I use the Progenitor symbols, and hmm, what should it look like?

---------------

I mentally crumpled up another design and tossed it in the trash. Fuck it, I have at least six days to design something while I travel to Altair. And I also might want to just not have the entire "mission patch on the arm" thing because it would be too similar, and that might be bad.

Time to design more clothes. I never liked shopping, but that's probably because of clothing sizes.

I make a camouflaged version of the outfit I'm currently wearing. Ditch the purple markings, and add the camo pattern that the military recently adopted - in 2009. Ahaha, that's great. I wonder if they're going to copy it when I visit the SGC. I also add a flak vest.

It looked too Tau'ri, so I swapped the vest for a sort of skirt with pouches, and a bandolier that I can load with ammo (leaving aside I'd probably be able to just fabricate ammo directly into a gun.) Then I added an armored vest underneath that. Looks nice.

I also need a dress uniform. I eventually settle on something similar to a sport jacket, in blue, with a matching pair of fancy, non-pocketed pants. Cargo pants are awesome, whenever I could find them as a human. I keep my combat boots, however. My mom wore them to her wedding, so I figure those are good enough for me. And also because it's seriously hard to find a pair of nice-looking dress shoes that don't hurt, so fuck those. I go with a purple shirt, instead of white. Finally, I add triangles over my shoulders, in silver this time, and white bands around my forearms. Anything else? Probably not.

Oh, maybe I should have a way of "interacting" with my technology that doesn't make my control look telepathic. It looked kind of like a tablet, but I could fold it up and stick it in a pocket. And then I need to come up with an interface for - oh look, an interface-creation tool. That was convenient, just like the terrain tool. Why the heck does a military weapon have those?

Alright, now I need to lock it to my avatar, annnnd done.

With that finished, I supposed I had to talk to the locals.

-------------------------

Well, Rachel attempts to social in the next chapter. Good luck, Rachel! Don't trip and fall on your new face!

 

[ltmauve]

Chapter 14​

16 July 2000
7pm Nasyan time

An Osprey descended from orbit with several schools of Vengeances, reaching the point where I'd gathered the Nasyans. An angular craft with swept-forwards wings, and a boxy, panelled fuselage. I'd mounted a pair of small teleporters beneath the body, and a set of transportation rings that could reach both the inside and the outside of the craft. Assuming there was an inside. While the Osprey could carrying living beings and M-Bots, it could also hold larger bots, all the way up to a hypothetical 25 meter Commander chassis. This was done by having the floor raise up flush to the ceiling, and each segment of the walls - or maybe bulkheads was the term - was actually a gripping arm.

I had my avatar inside the Osprey. No developing a god complex here. I will start off as the fallible person that I am. I will not appear in a flash of light. No smoke, no mirrors, and hopefully no one would call me a god. I didn't even wear my dress uniform.

The Osprey and four of the Vengeances accompanying it had their visual stealth off, and their aerodynamic stealth was muted so they could still be heard.

Being linked to the avatar seemed to bring back some of my habits from when I was human, I noted as I started twitching my toes. I had started that because it's really hard for people to notice, as opposed to twitching my fingers. I felt the bump as the Osprey landed. Showtime.

I walked around to the front of the Osprey, then realized that because I landed on level ground, I couldn't be seen by anyone in the back. Well then. I jumped up onto the roof of the Osprey, relying on Bullshit Progenitor Engineering™ to let me get up there.

I overestimated, and went flying a bit too far. With a grunt, I landed off-balance and fell flat on my face.

"Ow." I said. "Why did I connect the pain mappings again?" I rubbed my head and sat up.

So I just faceplanted in front of about 2,000 people. On the one hand, my dignity hurts. On the other hand, I don't think anyone's going to be calling me a god after this. I stood up, and took a moment to configure the speaker delays on my bots that were hanging around, to properly amplify my voice without creating an echo.

"Hello, people of Nasya!" I called out, giving them a friendly wave. There was muttering. Was that right? Who cares, I'm making this up as I go along.

"I am Rachel Ezros. And I am not a god." The muttering got louder. "I am a very fallible, imperfect being. I have my flaws. And in spite of this, all of you who stand before me are alive and free. Free from the worms that call themselves gods. The Stargate has been sealed, and carried into orbit. My fleets have enveloped the world in their protection. You are safe from the false gods." The muttering increased.

"However, you are not free from the mistakes of my fuck-ups. The disaster of the last night was caused by my failings." The muttering got a bit louder. "However, I am now going to help you fix that. Everyone who actually knows how to run a village, come to the front."

With that, I hopped off the Osprey onto the ground. And faceplanted again. I bit out the pain, stood up, and turned to face the village leaders. There were ten of them, lead by a woman about 160 cm tall, with a some fancy necklace.

"So…" I said, and then decided to clean myself off. I activated my avatar's fabricators, and used them to reclaim all the dust and dirt off me in a purple mist that vanished quickly. "Your name?"

"Rasha. What do you want?" She finally asked.

"What I want to know is what's needed to build villages for about 2,000 people." There was a pause after this moment.

"You're… you're actually serious about helping us?" The woman asked.

"Yup." I nodded. "I can help, you need help, and it's my fault. So I'm going to help, because it's the right thing to do." They seemed more surprised at that.

"What?"

"Give me a list - location traits, supplies, infrastructure, that kind of things." I sighed. "I have no idea how to run a village, and I have quite frankly no desire to do so. So, I'm going to let people who actually know they're doing do it."

"What?"

-----------------------------------------------------

I logged everything the village leaders said in a list. Everything they listed was something that made sense. I suppose that they were still a bit in shock that I had actually offered to help, that they didn't try to take advantage of the situation. Well, they might have asked for a lot of wood, but it wasn't a problem for me, given that I could make the amount they requested in seconds without touching my economy.

I'd also started looking for a place to relocate the Nasyans to. Good soil, plenty of running water, nearby forests, and a windbreak to keep winter winds from running through the village. I had recon data of the entire planet, so I looked through that to find out where to go. As for a windbreak, I was planning to just put walls around the villages anyway, so that was fine.

I finally found a location. It was slightly closer to the equator, and was a flat plain that could probably support three times the population of the area with the current level of farming they had.

I sent a Gull over to the area, to add mini-teleporters, turrets, and walls to the sites, as well as fabricate the needed supplies. I gave each village a central meeting house that all of them would be able to keep out of the elements from - if they were cramped. If I had given them houses, they would have either been nicer than what the villagers made, or I'd have to keep making more houses as the villages expanded. This way, they made their own houses, and I didn't have to worry too much about population expansion.

There were twelve sites, since in addition to the ten destroyed villages I was going to be moving the two ones that were intact. In addition to the fact that part of their fields were destroyed by the fire, leaving them by themselves didn't seem like a good idea. However, by this point it was getting to be late evening, and I felt I should probably wrap up for the night.

Lindy, meanwhile, had been designing for the hour or so I'd been dealing with this, and when I returned my attention to my commander body, she started asking questions.

"What were you doing?" She asked, vaguely curious.

"Giving them aid."

"Why?"

"Because it's my fault. Because it's the right thing to do. Because they need it."

"Fascinating." At Lindy's emotionless reply, I burst out laughing.

"Are you going to raise one of your eyebrows?" I sent back. My avatar was curled up on the deck of the osprey, shaking with laughter.

"I do not understand." She responded. "I do not even have eyebrows."

"Oh, that's right, we should get you your own avatar." I said, pulling up my modified design and sending a ping to Lindy to co-operatively design it. "These are the kind of designs that shouldn't be shared or controlled by other commanders. Even use of someone else's commander body is more acceptable than hijacking an avatar."

"Really?" Lindy said, sending revulsion over the link. Instincts are instincts, I guess.

"Yeah. Don't use another Commander's avatar design, either." I said. Teaching your kids manners starts early. "Now, yours should look similar to mine, but recognizably different."

"I do not understand." She responded. "What is the purpose of these avatars?"

"For interacting with humans. If you look like a human, things will go much better."

"Ahh…" Comprehension filtered through the empathic links.

"So, a bit shorter than mine, and let's change up the hair a bit. Also, adjust the facial structure a bit." I said. Lindy complied, and....

"That's too much of an adjustment." I winced a bit. "Also the face looks a bit off. Humans would be severely uncomfortable around it." I adjusted the face back out of the uncanny valley, and brought her height back up to 172cm. I also swapped the side her fang was on.

"And as for your hair…" I noted, frowning at her proposed buzz cut. I started with knee-length hair, then braided it into a single long rope.

"Do you like this better?" I asked.

"That is highly impractical." She responded.

"Well…" I tried another variation on it. "How about this?"

"Yes, that is acceptable." She said.

"Great." I passed her the templates for clothing, putting a ping on the "work" outfit I was currently wearing. "Let's see what it actually looks like."

Lindy activated her own fabricator, and purple mist flowed out, forming into her avatar. Which promptly started doing nothing.

"Okay, you need to use the sync protocols I gave you in order to make it move properly." I was going to need to make a "sleep mode" for the avatars so we could withdraw from them without them going blank. They'd still blink, but that was it. And as a human I sometimes just randomly stared at stuff anyway while I was thinking. Actually, that was probably a good thing, since it could be dismissed as a human thing, not an avatar-bot problem.

She activated the protocols and… nothing changed. Actually she did start blinking. But then again, she was pretty emotionless, and the protocols wouldn't change that.

"Alright." I said. "Now, we need to move on. We have several systems that we need to check out. We start by sending in probes. We want to check for enemy spaceships. Then we send in a probe, to check out each world. If there are inhabitants, we keep everything below ground on the nearby worlds in the system. Use 'build_custom_367' for those, and avoid the inhabited worlds. Got that?"

"Yes."

"Now," I stretched my avatar. "Even if a world is uninhabited, we still need to check it for structures. If the world is uninhabited, take the structure and lift it into orbit. Once people and structures have been checked for, you see what I'm doing in Penta-6 with all the rocky bodies?"

"I'm not sure."

"Okay, see this." I showed her the final stage of each of Penta-6's worlds: 7500 kilometer radius, everything down to 1000 kilometers should be Towers, followed by a 750 kilometer layer of packed Research Cores, with the upsized Halley at the center. "Start with the Towers, then the Research Core layers, then the super-Halley."

"Right." She responded.

"If you need to stay underground, just do as many of the Towers as you can, then go to the Research Cores and the Halley."

"Right." She responded.

"And as for the gas giants, build_jig is your friend."

"You appear to be relocating Penta-6's planets." Lindy noted, with some small amusement, perhaps.

"Yeah." I said. "If you're adding Towers and going wide open, you'll need to add a bunch of mini-Halleys to the Towers to move each world into a safe orbit. Otherwise the added mass will crash moons into their planets."

"Right." She responded.

"Okay, let's get started." I said.

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17 July 2000
1 am Nasyan time.

There were the five systems without any Earthlike planets. They were all completely empty, and Lindy and I had them starting to get built on without any trouble.

The other four were interesting. One had a Stargate, with an abandoned village nearby. Upon investigation, the village hadn't been abandoned, just everyone had died in their sleep. Ah, this one. I told Lindy to look for a hidden base.

"There was a hidden base. How did you know that there would be one?" She asked, as she wrapped the base in Progenitor solid armor.

"Well... " She was my daughter, and I was still nervous about telling her. "I know this world as a work of fiction. Some things are different, but some things do correspond." I responded. "Also please let no one else know of this."

"Understood." Lindy responded. "Why do you not want anyone else to know?"

"Because they wouldn't believe me, especially because some of the things may be wrong, but also because they couldn't verify that I knew such things without me going into creepy detail. It's also such a huge hassle, because I don't have exact details that they would bug me for."

"So what should I say about you?"

"I'm from either interdimensional or great intergalactic distances, I'm not sure which. That should work for that much." I frowned. "But let's worry about this later, when we start talking to people."

 

[ltmauve]

Is Jolinar on-world right now? Did a Tok'ra just see you faceplant and call yourself fallible?

Click to shrink...

Nope. That was at the start of season 2. We're into season 4, though not by much.

Anyway incoming chapter!
-------------------------------------------------

Chapter 15​

17 July 2000
4 am Nasyan time.

I found an Ancient lab on one of the worlds I was looking at. I boosted it into orbit, sealed the Stargate, and boosted that into orbit as well. I would look at it later. I needed to loot things from Earth first.

Lindy ran across an inhabited world. There was no Goa'uld presence, and I told her to monitor the gate for a month, and if nothing came through to bury it. Then I looked at the scans. Was that Vis Uban? It looked like it. Interesting and had Ancient ruins? Yes. Particularly important? No.

On the second-to-last world, there was a pyramid near the Stargate. I investigated using c-fabbers and c-dox. After gaining entrance, in a slow process that took longer because of lag, I sent them on search patterns. One of them found a room, containing a sarcophagus. Sarcoughous tech was a nice stopgap until I got Ancient healing technology. Then I realized that it had iron bands holding it shut.

Hang on a second. This was the pyramid in the episode The Tomb. The one with one of those Goa'uld Eyes that Anubis used to power his superweapon. My bots tore through the facility, looking for it. Found it.

"Yoink!"

"What does that mean?" Lindy asked.

"It's the noise you make when you steal something important." I responded, grinning.

I arranged for the Eye to be sent to Penta-6, while I put a fake with a tracker in place. And then I left the system alone. Actually, I detonated some small explosives in the area, to stop the Russian team from poking their noses in there and dragging another Russian team and SG-1 into the mess. That wouldn't deter Anubis though, not that I wanted to.

And then that was done. We still had about 24 hours to go until our fleets launched.

------------------------------

I left for Altair shortly after we finished. Lindy would herd the Nasyans to their new home tomorrow, or in about three hours.

On the Stormfront traveling through hyperspace, I reviewed the design Lindy had come up with.

"Mwa ha ha ha ha!" I cackled madly, my avatar's hands clenching. "Mwa ha ha ha ha!"

"Mom, are you okay?" Lindy asked.

"Mwa ha ha ha ha!" I continued cackling. "Yes, this is excellent!" I sent back across the link. "Most excellent. So much better than my version!"

"Alright." Lindy sent back.

"Hey, I'm complimenting your design skills. You need to be polite and thank people." I was a bit irritated, but given it had taken until college until I got the hang of that, I wasn't in the best position to judge.

"Oh. So 'Thank you?'" Lindy queried.

"Yeah. By the way, I'm adapting some of these ideas into the Tower design, and I'll use these in our system assimilation protocols." I responded. "But first, we need to file off the edges on this design."

"The edges present in -"

"Lindy." I sighed.

-------------------------------------------------

Meanwhile, back on Nasya, Lindy was scaring the villagers a bit. They were moving, and she hadn't needed to shoot people just yet, so that was good enough for now. She also wasn't using my voice, at least. That way I would be able to apologize for her rudeness.

Once everyone had been moved, I sighed and moved onto other projects. With 100 billion stars to look at, I needed a way to check them automatically. Checking for hidden facilities, populations, and what to do in each case. Automatically handling rearranging the planets so I could expand them to 15,000 kilometers across was another task. I automated as much as I could. It would get a test soon, as the fleets started moving out and conquering every world in the galaxy. We would test it on a few systems, and while the fleets going to other systems would stop about half a light-year out, before beginning to self-replicate.

Once our scripts checked out, then we would order all our fleets to begin conquering. And that would mean we could wipe the Goa'uld out whenever we wanted. I, of course, wanted some way to eliminate the lag that transmitting across the galaxy gave. A battle certainly could be won or lost in that time. And even fifteen minutes might be enough for something bad to happen. Like a planet getting wiped out.

Asgard communication tech was probably good enough, since I recall several real-time conversations in the series. Of course, that left the question of how to get that technology. I knew that each of the Protected Planets had a communication device at them, but I wasn't sure that barging in there and copying the tech would be the best idea. I needed - no, I wanted to be able to help the Asgard and be on good terms with them. So again, stealing the tech wouldn't be the best idea.

I suppose I could just ask for a communications device and then reverse-engineer from that. But again, that would be difficult. And I also wanted the Asgard hyperdrives and shields. The earliest point to get those would probably be when Anubis kidnaps Thor.

Oh Anubis. How to deal with him? If I destroy his body, he just turns into a ghost and possesses someone nearby. And I do not want to find out what that looks like if he can possess me using one of my units. So, I'll just have to blow up anything he can make before it's finished. That should defang him, turning him into an annoying ghost at worst. Assuming I don't get possessed.

Better work on counter-possession protocols then. Add it to my list of things to do. I was simultaneously bored and having a huge list of things to do. Of course, most of those things depended on me having something in the area, and I was too big to fit through the Stargates. Maybe I should build my own. Actually, I didn't analyze the Stargate, because I figured it would be too complex to be resolved in a reasonable amount of time. Maybe once I had enough Research Cores, I could let some of them mull the Stargate over, but for now I wanted to be able to research what I came across fairly easily.

Commandering. Far harder than it looked in the game.

 

[ltmauve]

Chapter 16​

20 July 2000
1305 hours.

-------------------------
Jack
------------------------

"We'll need snacks." O'Neill commented, looking at the pilfered plans for the upgraded mothership.

"We'll also need some high explosives and a way to get through the gate." Carter shot back, rolling her eyes. O'Neill could sometimes be a bit silly.

"Well, those should be easy to get." Daniel said. "Just stroll right into the armory, and stroll right out. We'll be in and out before they can finish blinking."

----------------------------------------

"Who the hell is dialing out right now?" Hammond asked, as the outgoing wormhole alarm picked up. "We don't have anything scheduled for today."

He picked up the phone, tapping in an extension. "This is General Hammond. I need someone to check up on SG-1 and our Tok'ra guests."

---------------

Below, in the Gate room, O'Neill, Carter, and Daniel waited, watching the ring spin as the dialing sequence advanced.

Teal'c strode into the room. "O'Neill!"

"Not this time, Teal'c." O'Neill responded as the seventh chevron locked. And then nothing happened. The lights on the gate went out. The outgoing wormhole alarm silenced.

"Well this is awkward." Daniel said, as the guards started groaning their way back to consciousness.

----------------------------------------------

"Well, this is troubling." Anise said.

"You were planning on them doing that, weren't you?" Hammond declared more than asked.

"I was not referring to SG-1's behavior, but the fact that the Stargate did not connect." Anise deflected.

"That's concerning. What's more concerning is that you seemed to try to compromise my best team with untested alien technology." Hammon attempted to steer the conversation back towards the topic he wanted to pursue: chew out the Tok'ra scientist over her leveraging the team into accepting.

"I will need to report to my superiors about this problem." Anise refused to allow that, ignoring the change in topic.

------------------------------

"The report from the Tok'ra is clear. They have been unable to dial the location of the prototype ha'tak." Anise reported a few hours later.

"Right, so either the gate is buried, or gone." Hammond responded. "I'm going to guess it's gone."

"I would assume that as well. In which case it is likely that the prototype is gone. Most likely a rival of Apophis has found the site, and either captured or destroyed the prototype. Hopefully it was destroyed along with all the data on it. The performance of the prototype is estimated to be four to five times that of the previous standard for ha'taks. If it was captured as-is, the attacker will likely be able to field it within the next three to four months."

"Well, we'll see if we can do anything about that, then." Hammond sighed.

----------------------------------------------

22 July 2000
10am mountain time

"Sir, the Tok'ra have given us an intel package, and it's not good news."

"Alright soldier, let's hear it." Hammond sighed. This was not turning out to be a fun week.

"Apophis is on the move. Apparently the loss of his super-mothership ticked him off more than expected, and now he's gathering his fleet to attack whoever stole or destroyed it. Of course, he's just as much in the dark as we are about who actually stole the thing, so he'll be flailing around hitting people and causing all sorts of trouble until he decides to stop."

"Alright. Get the analysts to look at the data themselves." Hammond ordered.

"I'll have copies to them in five minutes, sir."

"Is that all the news we have?"

"Mostly. There are some bits about Yu and Ba'al, but nothing that looks relevant to our operations for the moment."

"Alright. Dismissed."

 

[ltmauve]

Chapter 17

23 July 2000
2pm mountain time.

Six days later, my small fleet arrived in orbit of Earth. Not Altair, as I'd decided that I needed to handle something first. My searching of Earth had been going quite well, and I had found a few of the things I was looking for. I still hadn't found some of the things, including something that would probably be happening soon. That was making me nervous.

I had, on the trip over, built myself some personal weapons. Zats, plasma weapons, railguns, pistol, assault rifle, submachine gun, grenades, chemically-propelled weaponry just in case. I'd had to fabricate a Research Core in the hanger of the Stormfront in order to do the designs, but that wasn't really a hassle.

We'd also gotten the Altairian tech base captured. Nothing too interesting, except forcefield walls and some AI research. They also had spacesuits. Fairly unremarkable, but something useful if I planned to have humans around. Some cute little weaponry and body armor as well, and medical technology that was only better in terms of brain knowledge. They also had power transfer technology, but it was so far below my own that I didn't even bother.

I wasn't doing just that, either. Once the Altairian tech base was captured, I tried to have the research network take a look at the Stargate design, only to find that I couldn't. Turns out the Research Network can't handle assigning two core to the same task if they're more than 532.5 AU apart, because of network lag meaning syncing is too time-consuming. I could try writing some scripts to fix it, but there was a simpler way to handle this new limit. It'd have to wait until I was done throwing down all the fleets, but it would work.

Meanwhile, Lindy had looked over the list of units in the default package, started complaining about her engineering sensibilities, and then went and redid our unit base. First, she'd compiled every weapon and chassis combination together. Flak turrets on a Leviathan? A flamer on the Drifter? We had those. Regardless of what type of situation we found ourselves in, we had a full set of tools to handle the situation.

Then, she'd redid the factory interfaces to handle the sheer number of units we had now. She'd tagged them with the type of units and situations we'd be using them in. And she'd set the lists up to filter out units we couldn't make yet, which wasn't a problem in an established system, but when we were just building up it would would be a difference of microseconds, which could be important if we were running up against an enemy that could also von Neuman on the same scale we could. It would also be useful if we didn't have access to a Research Core.

Of course, we'd also been checking over the systems that were getting assimilated. Since it would take a month for us to check the "Yoink Stargate" protocol regardless, that was one possible bug. But it'd been fairly smooth sailing with the rest of the protocols. There'd been a few random fires, but no one had died, even with the dozen inhabited systems we'd already run across. Probably after another week we'd let our fleets go nuts and go after everything.

But soon enough, it was time to reclaim the blackened, dented sheet of Progenitor solid armor that was sitting on the deck of my Stormfront. Fun with weapons and designs time is over, time to SG team. By myself. No one to crack jokes with. Dang it.

One of the things I had found on Earth was Merlin's cave in Glastonbury Tor. I had a Progenitor-grade avatar, the location of the thing, a ring transporter platform, and access to Dr. Jackson's Reading Ancient for Dummies. Okay, he didn't call it that, probably. More likely he called it his cheat sheet or something.

Time to get started. I fully linked to my new avatar, dressed in my camo outfit with my railgun SMG, and activated the ring transporter. Rings float up, flash of light, and I'm down in the cave. It looks far more like… it doesn't look like it did in the TV show. The floor is polished black stone, the walls and ceiling polished grey. Bronze panels run down columns built into the curving wall. Ancient writing runs in circles around a cylindrical plinth in the center of the room, which has a sword stuck into it. It looks very Lantean. Or rather, it looks a lot like the sets in the Atlantis TV show.

I walked over to the sword and yanked it out. Unlike the sword they used in the show, which was an unremarkable broadsword (or whatever category of sword it was) this sword is very Lantean in design. A long bronze tube for a hilt, with slots cut in it to show the glowing crystal beneath. The crossguard is a silver hexagonal plate, bulky and chamfered on the edges. The blade doesn't look like anything like any human sword used, with the blade broader than my hand and the tip not smooth at all, but made with hard angles. The side of the blade is flat, and slits have been cut in the surface to show the crystal underneath, the same as in the hilt. After looking it over, I save the design to a folder. If I ever have to wield another blade, I want it to look like this.

I held it one-handed, and walked towards the only door. Actually, I should probably read the Ancient writing on the floor. Speaking of other differences between the show and reality, Ancient letters aren't blocky. They're all flowing lines that would have to be blurred to look like the symbols shown in the TV show. After translating, I don't find anything too important on the floor of the main room, so I pass through the door. Interestingly, I can fit all 205 cm of myself and my horn of hair through the door. Were the Ancients taller than modern humans?

The door goes into a corridor with a bunch of doors on either side, with the wall-fused columns between each one. (I'm sure there's a term architects use for that.) There are a dozen or so of them, and only one is open. Hmmm. Looks like the system noticed my arrival and only opened one of them.

I step inside. There's another plinth in the middle of this room, and no columns or writing on the floor. The door closes behind me as I look at the plinth.

It's covered by a glassy surface, showing Ancient writing. One large paragraph, and several words beneath it. I look at Reading Ancient for Dummies, and try to translate it.

<A city/fortress/state great/mighty/awesome is under threat/attack/siege. It has a shield powerful/invincible/impenetrable surrounding it. It within there is food/sustenance sufficient of years ten. It within there is energy/capability sufficient of years uncounted. The city rests above a cliff. The cliff reinforced enough of years ten…

...and attempts of drains/exhaust/runoff travel/climbing were met only with shield/wall. Nevertheless attacker will/might/thought could/would city/fortress/state capture.>​

There's a lot of text here, describing how the city cannot be attacked. And it ends saying the city can fall whenever the attacker wants it to. The answers at the bottom are: <Plague/sickness, asteroid/meteor, drill/underground, river/stream, rust/corrosion, storm/rain/clouds, night/darkness/end, falling/mass.>

Which makes no sense. Like, even if they could get through the shield, the defenders have walls wide enough to race on, if my translation is right.

And then I notice my horn bending. The ceiling's already falling, and I haven't even selected an answer. Hey, you know what would be great? If I could accelerate time like Uber said Commanders could do in their writings. First the instant research, now this.

 

[ltmauve]

Chapter 18​

RIght, I haven't even tried an answer and I'm already getting smushed. Well, what could it be? Well I'm supposed to select the way the city falls. <Plague?> Well the city is described as being wealthy and clean, so unlikely. On the other hand, the Ancients did have a plague that kicked them out of the Milky Way. I move on. <Meteor?> Well the shield is really strong and it's "capture," which suggests the city is intact. <Drill?> No, the shield protects the drains, so presumably the shield is a full bubble. <River?> When was this mentioned in the problem? Nope. <Rust?> Ancient stuff doesn't rust. <Clouds?> If the city uses solar panels, maybe? <End?> Doesn't make sense, if it's the end of the universe or the end of the city. <Falling?> Wait, is this gravity? A black hole attack?

At this point, I'm crouching over, leaning on the plinth. Fuck fuck fuck think you idiot. Alright, maybe that's what the energy is uncountable thing meant, solar power? Not a closed system, so infinite energy?

Wait - the drains. It's in steady-state, meaning that inputs equal outputs. <River> Water has to be entering the city to replace whatever's being lost through the drains.

The plinth chimes, pulses with light for a moment, and then the ceiling starts rising. Much faster than it fell. I stretch my arms up, not even close to the ceiling. Yeah, Ancients were probably pretty tall. The door had opened by this point, so I went back into the hallway.

That puzzle what a lot harder than the ones in the show. You didn't just need to be able to translate Ancient, you also had to be able to understand the result and comprehend a fairly abstract problem. I guess Merlin was actually a bit more selective than the show let on.

When I returned to the first room, a holographic image formed into existence. The Black Knight, I can handle this. Except the image that formed wasn't of the nice friendly Black Knight that the show had. An obsidian set of armor, towering above me, lit with glowing red crystals. In its hands was a copy of the sword in my hand, except being made out of black glass and with glowing red crystals instead of blue.

Today is just not my day. I managed to think as the Obsidian Knight swung at me.

-----------------------------------------------------
Rasha
-----------------------------------------------------

Rasha sighed, grunted, and hauled another beam of wood over to the stone platform. Their new god was being oddly generous. And strange. For starters, there was her insistence that she not be referred to as a god. Also her clumsiness and lack of tact. Her clothes were well-made and fit her well, but they were hardly gaudy.

Rachel's strange generosity was unusual. She'd given them the resources to build a new village, and she'd provided a walled location to do it. She'd given them enough for everyone, not just for their own village. Apparently she hadn't realized that Rasha's estimate was for all the people, not just one village. And she'd taken them to the new village by building a Stargate out of thin air. Out of thin air.

Rachel, regardless of what she said, was clearly more of a god than either Kronos or Hades. She had managed to black out the sky and destroy Hades before she had even fully woken from her first shout.

That was more power than appeared in the wildest of legends about the gods, before they left the world. Some had apparently been able to bring back the dead, or were invincible. But Rachel had shook the world with her voice, and then lit it on fire.

And then she'd described it as a failure. Rachel was very confusing to Rasha.

--------------------------------------------------------
Lindy
--------------------------------------------------------

Lindy continued to monitor the planet of Nasya. Most of it was fairly uninteresting. The only points of notable interest were the 15 new villages that were being built at the sites located by <Mom>.

<Mom> had insisted that they should avoid helping the Nasyans to the point where it hurt them. Lindy did not understand how that could happen, as the Nasyans were likely to suffer minor amounts of exposure to cold weather overnight, given the weather predictions. Currently, they were breaking up the wood into pieces too small to be useful for building.

"Mom, what are the villagers doing?" She asked, attaching the relevant sensor data. Then she waited 30 seconds for the response.

"I'm a bit busy here!" Came the shouted response, tinged with panic and frustration. Well, that was no help at all. Well, she would continue to observe. The villagers continued to break down the wood, some into even smaller pieces. Interesting.

She looked at <Mom's> sensor data, to see what was happening. It seemed she was vastly underutilizing her assets. Since teleportation to the area was possible, transportation of a warhead to the combat site would eliminate the hostile.

She pinged <Mom> to inform her of the overlooked option.

32 seconds later she got a response. "Lindy no."

 

[ltmauve]

Chapter 19​

-------------------------------------------------
Rachel
-------------------------------------------------

I barely managed to jump back out of the way of the two-handed swing directly at my face. The sword left a glowing red trail in the air as it passed.

I staggered backwards for a moment, until I got my feet under me. I still hadn't gotten the hang of my avatar. In the meantime, the knight had recovered from its swing, and tried to lance me with the big scary tip of its sword. I threw myself out of the way, scrambling to my feet after a moment.

This let the knight get in another attack. I wasn't going to be getting anywhere like this. The only way to shut down the knight was with the sword or blowing everything up, and I didn't want to blow everything up.

I recovered from the last attack, and put my sword in something that was probably a guard position. I should probably learn how to actually swordfight at some point.

The knight swung again. I put my blade inbetween me and the strike. The impact nearly knocked the sword out of my hand. Maybe I should be using a two-handed grip?

I was attacked yet again, and this time the strike powered through my block. A quarter of my health vanished with that strike. This would be a really good point to have accelerated perception, but nooo, that's only for overpowered self-inserts.
I love you senpai nothing personal.
I staggered back to my feet and put my left hand on the grip. Meanwhile, the Obsidian Knight leisurely prepared for another attack. I growled.

This time, the block held. I took my left hand and gripped the Knight's sword. Then I took my blade and started hammering at him. Of course, my blade just bounced off his armor. I needed to go for a joint.

The knight yanked, and I lost my grip on the blade. I stumbled again.

Another strike I was barely able to deflect. I was down to two-thirds health. My skin glowed with ultraviolet light as the heat-charge dissipated out of it and decayed.

I went on the offensive, and swung at the neck. Blocked. Blocked too damn easy. I backed up and lunged for a seam in the breastplate. This time the knight didn't block my attack. As I looked up, I realized why.

WHAM! As the knight slowly lifted his sword back onto his shoulder, I crawled to my knees. One third of my health remained. Come on, move. I pulled my legs under me. The knight had lifted his sword up to finish me off.

I leapt up, past the raised sword. Then I brought my sword down as I fell, right into the knight's face.

He staggered, and then I took the offensive. I didn't try any big attacks. Instead, I kept swiping at him, the tip of the sword pinging across his armor. Then he blocked one of my attacks.

Back again on the defensive. Block, block, dodge. Dodge, block, dodge. Again and again I stumbled from the force of the hits. Red and blue arcs filled the chamber from our moves.

Then I got a message from Lindy. "Mom, what are the villagers doing?" with some attached data.

"I'm a bit busy right now!" I hollered across the link, ignoring the data for now. Then I dodged another lunge, and the knight's blade crashed into the wall, staggering him. I swiped at the back of his knee, and his foot slipped a little more. I thrust at his armpit.

The tip of my blade slip across the chestplate, making it to the joint, but losing energy. I made a fist and whacked the pommel, driving the blade in a bit further. The knight turned to face me, and I backed up, dropping into my pseudo-guard.

He swung from the side, and I managed to block him with barely the hint of a stagger. Then I grabbed his sword again, and aimed the tip of my sword at the inside of his elbow. Stab.

The tip punched into his elbow. I withdrew it and aimed again. Stab.

The knight yanked away, and I staggered yet again as I didn't let go soon enough. His right hand dropped from his sword, hanging limp beneath the elbow. He lunged, swinging from above, and I stepped forward, inside his guard. I brought my sword up, towards the face.

"AHHHHHHHH!!!!!" I screamed as loud as the avatar would let me, and then stabbed. The tip of the blade went into the neck joint, the weight of the knight making up for my lacking skill.

My blade, going into the helmet of the knight. His blade, frozen midswing. We both waited for a moment, in stillness. And then the knight dissolved, turning into dust. Wow. Pretty sure that didn't happen during the show. It was pretty cool though. I took the sword and plunged it back into the plinth at the center.

With a glow of golden light, treasure appeared around me. The glow of the words on the floor changed from green to blue, and another set appeared. Now, what do we have here?

Coins, coins, jewelry, jugs, chest of gold, coins, jewelry, coins, coins, Lantean hemisphere of some sort, coins, jugs of coins, jewelry, chest of gold coins, book. Ah. A book. Written in Ancient, which I can't read very well.

I looked at the Lantean hemisphere device. Presumably, it was the long-range bodyswap device that alerted the Ori to the Milky Way presence in the show. Didn't look like the ones in the show did. There were orangish crystal balls nearby, with brown-grey metal markings on it. They looked like they would fit into slots on the device. Okay, so that's what the actual interface stones looked like.

Just then I got a ping from Lindy: an indicator on one of the nuclear warheads I prefabricated just in case, and the ring transporter. Wait, what did she-? Oh. Oh. Goddamnit Lindy.

After a couple of seconds of facepalming, I sent back "Lindy no."

I fabricated a cloth bag, and put it over the interface stones, upside-down. Then I carefully, to avoid touching them, folded the bag around them. I wasn't taking any chances with this weird Ancient bodyswap bullshit.

There was also a copy of the sword, with a scabbard, leaning against the plinth in the middle of room. A medallion was looped around the scabbard belt. I attached the belt, leaving the medallion in place.

I grabbed the bodyswap device, tucked the book under my arm, and headed to the ring platform. That was probably all I needed to save.

I activated the ring platform, swapping me with a couple of c-fabbers that immediately got to work covering everything in a purple mist of scanning femtotech. Meanwhile, on the Stormfront, I began fabricating a box to put all my cool stuff in. Some foam and latches later, all my loot was stored.

That done, I looked at the other exploration progress. Lots of nothing. It had been a week since I had started looking, but clearly I wasn't doing enough. Clearly I needed more Gulls and hummingbirds. Maybe I should use Vengeances instead? They were a bit faster.

Also, I forgot to turn all my unit cannons on. Well then, let's fix the fact that the Earth is not currently covered in Gulls. I want a unit density of 50 Gulls per square kilometer, and 10 Vengeances per square kilometer, as well as five extra wings of 50 over Area 51, the SGC, and other sites of interest. This way, if anyone did try attacking, they'd have to deal with that. In addition to the fleets I'd already had assembling in orbit. Those were probably more important, though.

Well, that should net me some Ancient technology to look at. And then throw into my Research Network in order to get me new shinies.

-------------------------
So yeah, that's how Rachel's fight went. Queue victory theme! Hora hora

 

[ltmauve]

Well, no one noticed the invisitext in Chapter 19 (or in Chapter 4, though that's not that important)
Anyway, next chapter:
--------------------------------------------------------------

Chapter 20​

While I was waiting for my fabbers to arrive and coat the planet (which would take only a few minutes once they started, since I had run build_custom_367 on every solid body in the Solar System besides Earth) I decided to connect to the internet.

Connect my mind directly to the internet? What madness! Which is why I was using a shell layer inbetween me and the roaring sea of insanity that was the internet. Set up using architecture completely different than anything on Earth, I figured it should be safe from attacks. I did need to insert a connection into the physical infrastructure of the internet somewhere, but that was relatively easy.

And once that was done, my units had arrived. Yoink, yoink, yoinkity yoink.

Ancient defense post? Well, it barely looked like it the one the show. It was much larger, and was connected to twelve remote sites some 36 kilometers from the main section. The main section was ring-shaped, and had in addition to the control chair living quarters, storage spaces, and a jumper bay. Sadly, that was empty.

The central section was barely at ten percent drone capacity, while the outer sites had about fifteen. Each of the outer sites had a small section where they could be controlled, but no chair.

Still, I nanomachine-scanned everything. The drones looked different than the show, like most of the things I had encountered. They were more mechanical, had more metal covering them, and had orange crystal instead of the yellow membrane-like material they had in the show. And after a few minutes of processing the data, I could fabricate them. I couldn't optimize them, or use anything they did in my own units, but that wasn't what I was doing.

C-fabbers walked down the tunnels that the drones were stored in, in hexagonal racks. At last the show finally got something right. Nanomachines laid down drone after drone, while I script I had written altered the data each fabber was using each time to make sure that each drone had its own serial number, and they did not repeat. The only reason I could do that is the Ancients also had atomic-level manufacturing, so the only differences between drones were the serial numbers. Yeah, drones had serial numbers. I mean, my units had them, but this was… well, it actually made sense, given that the drones had to synchronize with each other.

In the meantime, I found and nano-scanned the Ancient healing device (two meters larger than shown) in the jungles of Honduras (not Nicaragua,) a crashed alien spaceship in Montana (which I also surrounded with a few c-dox,) several old goa'uld temples in Egypt and Mesopotamia.

Wasn't there a temple with a crystal skull in it somewhere? Apparently not. Seemed kind of weird that it was only brought up once in the series and nothing changed. Hmm. Guess that meant it wasn't actually a real thing. Insofar as "real" could be applied to comparisons between a TV show I once watched in an alternate dimension and this situation.

So, bring up everything I found, except the ships. In those cases, I had a c-fabber remove some crystals and hide them somewhere in the ship. Also, not bringing up the preserved Goa'ulds. Those I just removed the wax seals of whatever container they were in, exposing them to the elements and letting them die.

Also, a note about real Goa'uld: First, they have a mass of tendrils that sprouts from their head. Second, they have two large nodes on the sides of their heads that contain highly enervated tissue loaded with RNA. That's probably the source of their genetic memory. And if the show's creators were aware of how Goa'uld actually looked like, it's little wonder they went with the "snake" design.

Well, that was Earth taken care of, I think. Wait, Lindy sent me a message about the villagers. Oh. They're trying to make firewood out of the lumbar. Which I treated so it wouldn't rot or catch fire.

They'd been trying to get the wood to catch fire for the past half hour. It wasn't working so well.

"Lindy, you should help them."

"Okay." I got back 30 seconds later.

"Lindy, that means help them." I sent, grumbling a bit. Then I realized she probably didn't know how to help them. "They need a heat source. No setting anything on fire, and make sure that it's visibly hot, so they don't hurt themselves on it."

"I see." Came the response.

I kept watching. Lindy had gone with the simple solution of putting small Inferno barrels high on the walls of the longhouses I'd fabricated earlier, that the villagers were currently sleeping in while they built their houses.

With that taken care of and nothing on fire that wasn't supposed to be, I turned towards the internet. Farwell, sanity.

------------------------------

I had a timer set for three hours. When that went off, I withdrew from the internet to process what I'd found. Or rather, what I hadn't found.

A lot of missing things. For instance, there was no Stargate TV show. That was expected, honestly. But there wasn't any show I had heard of. Star Trek wasn't a thing. Star Wars wasn't a thing. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis hadn't existed in this universe, either. Plenty of books and series that I remembered weren't here. But despite that, the culture was still the same. As long as I didn't mention specifics, I could discuss things in this Earth. I mean, there was still a sci-fi show from the 60's about the idealism of human beings in space. It was called Galaxy Quest.

That's right, Galaxy Quest was a serious show here. Despite the parody film being pretty accurate to the show, including the crushers in the only route to the core. (Though that only was shown in Galaxy Quest: The Next Generation.)

And all of this was giving me a sneaking suspicion that I would be traveling to those universes I couldn't find, if I could start traveling.