Writing is going okay, I think. I found the soundtrack for the world I'm writing for right now. I'm going to keep posting on Wednesday permanently I think.
I need to zalgo-fy the parts I'm writing right now so... *shrugs*
I did find a cute image for the world though.
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Chapter 36
16 August 2000
"First chevron encoded." I stated out loud, as the top chevron on Penta-6's Stargate ca-chunked, and the first chevron lit up. I was waiting in the embarkation room with a small army of c-fabbers, c-dox, buffalo, bison, and sparrows.
The ring spun again, and the top chevron ca-chunked again, and the second chevron lit up. "Second chevron, encoded." I stated.
"What are you doing, Mom?" Lindy asked me over the command network.
"Theater." I responded over the command network, not out loud. "Third chevron encoded." I stated aloud. Meanwhile, mist generators activated, spilling impressive-looking mist around the Stargate mountings. It was in no way needed, the same as my talking. But it looked cool.
"Fourth chevron encoded."
"Mom, I have often noted you behaving in unusual manners."
"Being weird is okay, Lindy." I said over the network. Hopefully she wouldn't bring up the chibi plane incident. "Fifth chevron encoded." I stated.
"You are stating that having unusual behavioral patterns is good?"
"Yeah, pretty much." I responded with a mental shrug. "Sixth chevron, encoded."
"Fascinating. But almost all cultures we have encountered will root out and attempt to remove people who have aberrant behavior. I have had to dissuade people on Nasya from banishing their fellow human beings."
"... I should have been paying more attention to Nasya."
"Do not worry. I find humans fascinating." Lindy said, and I could tell she was doing the Lindy-equivalent of grinning like a loon. "I am happy to watch over Nasya."
"Thanks." I smiled at her. "Seventh chevron, encoded." I stated.
"Good luck in Peg Dig." Lindy said.
"Thanks, Lindy." Despite her being quiet, she picked up human culture fast.
The Stargate spun to put the origin symbol, a pair of straight U's with a dot between them, right at the top. Ca-chunk.
"Eighth chevron locked." I stated. Hopefully the hack I had done to the gate would let Penta-6's gate connect to Atlantis's as if it was Earth's original gate.
Ka-woosh.
Great. Either my hack had worked, or the Atlantis gate hadn't had a lockout to prevent anyone besides Earth from dialing in.
"Wormhole established." I stated, then swept my hand out dramatically. "The Atlantis expedition will now commence!" I held the pose, then ordered a buffalo into the gate.
After an agonizing moment waiting for it to emerge, I received a signal from it. Well, that was certainly a larger room than the one in the show. I could fit my entire group and my Commander body in there. No lights on, like that was a problem for my sensor systems. There was a small control center at the top of a set of stairs against the far wall. In the ceiling was a hatch for puddle jumpers to drop through, and it was a hexagonal iris just like they had in the show.
Well, that's good, I guess. I sent through my entire group, including my avatar, to Atlantis. I'd follow as soon as the teleporter was finished. I wasn't concerned about getting smushed by the water, since my chassis was rated for operation with 20 kilometers of water on top of it. And if there was really a problem, I could fabricate a solid shell around my chassis to enable it to survive even deeper.
Which was good, because my core was in it, and I was stuck in it. No software AI transfer for me, a being of attocircuitry. If I lost my core, I was dead. No respawns, no switching into another chassis. Boom, that's it.
Fortunately, getting crushed by water was low on my concerns. I stepped through the completed teleporter. Now even if the Stargate cut out, I would be fine. But with the amount of power and stored energy I had at my disposal, I had hours left before I would have to close the Stargate. Time for me to take advantage of all the mass and particles I had on the other side.
With Atlantis's shield holding back the water from the tower walls, I sent my fabbers out by reclaiming the window. Meanwhile, the teleporter disgorged Gulls, Vengeances, and other full-sized units. I filtered through the sensor data, looking for the point where it looked like Atlantis's waterline was. After noting the lack of balconies below a certain height, I built a naval factory, and started using it to crank out submarine fabbers. I did have designs for those, despite them not having them in-game.
They dropped out of the factory's grav cushion, through the shield and into the water. And oh crap, there isn't any seafloor. Atlantis is resting on density variation. At the bottom of the city-ship, the water is 70% denser than usual, and at the top it's 32% denser. On average, with the city's midline 73 kilometers below the surface, the water is about 50% denser. My subs are still well within their pressure range, but anything else pretty much is out of luck. I have some of my fabbers build a solid shell around my chassis. Time to prepare.
One sub is going up to the surface to build a floating orbital launcher. Time to get recon data and all of the resources from other worlds in the system. In the meantime, my fabbers moved around inside the shield. Time to raise Atlantis.
Which I'm not sure how to do. Good thing I have still have a few hours left with a Stargate connecting me instantly to Penta-6 with its trillions of research cores. I should build one here, too. So, raising a city that masses 147 trillion tons about 90 kilometers through water. And I don't have hard stats on its integrity in regards to being moved around.
There might be a mechanism for raising the city built in. So, time to explore the city. Good thing Commanders can integrate data a lot faster than any organic being. Atlantis is actually a fractal snowflake 72 kilometers across. Not the hodgepodge of random towers that they presented in the show.
The main tower is 36 kilometers tall, half of that below the platforms of the city. It looks about a kilometer across at the top, and swells in hexagonal rooftops to a dozen kilometers across at the platforms.
The struts connecting the towers are massive fins that connect to half the length of each tower, massive bulky shapes filled with all sorts of crawl spaces and machinery.
Each stage of the fractal snowflake is half the size of the previous one. However, they all look the same, groups of hexagonal towers, some with a sharply sloping roof like the central tower does.
I check the underside, noting the arrangement of the sublight thrusters. Very nice. There were some solid, flat panels near them, that on closer inspection were definitely designed to be load-bearing structures. So maybe I could attach rockets to those, and use those to lift the city up? I do have a design for a hydrogen fusion rocket and I can use electrolysis to get hydrogen from water, which means the engines won't get above the water.
Or I could just generate a gravwell and use its gravity-neutralizing properties to reduce the weight of the city. I seem to miss an awful lot of simple solutions. You know you're a Stellar Siege Commander when "turn off gravity" is the simple option.
Connect to the research network, develop a networkable generator that I can use to create arbitrary fields, and begin the building process. Gulls swarmed to the edges of the city, and my subs at the surface moved out of the way of the projected emergence spot of the city. It's go time.
With that handed over to my subsystems, I need to figure out how to turn off the shields and add my own energy plants to the power grid of the city. I should save ZPM charge for when I really need it, like when I'm trying to move the city somewhere or I need full shields.
My c-fabbers step forward. I've modified their hands so that they can switch to having five dexterous fingers instead of three beefy ones. They start poking at the door controls. One of them manages to open the door to the gate control room, and c-doxes enter the room, sweeping it with line-of-sight sensors. No sense in not being cautious. Nothing here except the consoles. One of them was powered up.
I started moving more units around, trying to open doors. But pretty much the entire place was locked down. So, time for nanomachines, son. I had the c-fabbers reclaim the areas around the doors to access the wiring, then slapped a photovoltaic converter and power transceiver on the power cables.
Progenitor units use optical power and control systems. Immune to EMP, very low heating in processors, less sensitive to noise, all sorts of benefits. Also, making an asymmetric-reaction energy plant that produces electricity is a pain and a half. Meanwhile, the Ancients - or Lanteans, I guess, use optical control signals but electric power.
That was putting me about 30 seconds per door. It was going to take me a while to get through everything. Except for the entire exponentially growing army thing. And since Atlantis was a giant fractal snowflake, I had a free guide on how to use my expanding army to search it.
My teams made it into the top of the main tower. A massive, massive control center. At the center, on an elevated section, was a trio of seats for the commanding officers. There were also six control chairs. Six of them. I guess managing the city was that hard.
Surrounding them on a slightly lower section was a few dozen consoles of various types. It looked like they used holographic screens.
And surrounding that, on the lowest level, was a few hundred terminals. Solid screens, arranged in neat rows and grids, and with the same keyboard setup on every one. Data monitoring, I guess. And to think I could do the work of this entire room by myself, and still manage an entire solar system's economy while still leaving me very, very bored.
And only one console was powered on. I had my fabbers walk up to it and look at it. It was shield control.
Well, I knew what to do once I had Atlantis on the surface. In the meantime, I continued my exploration of the city. I ignored labs for the most part, simply stationing a couple c-fabbers and c-doxes in each one. The c-fabbers were to investigate eventually, and the c-dox were for shooting any morons that snuck in here and wanted to activate the goddamn exploding tumor machine.
I was going to wait until Atlantis was on the surface and unshielded before I started poking at the labs. Best not to be doing it under a power constraint.
