Machina ex Machina
(or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Von Neumann)
Chapter 3: Linear Acceleration
I had a fairly good idea of what the building was supposed to do. Energy and metal went in, and out would come war machines. For whatever reason, the designs were code-locked behind actually constructing the thing, but oh well. We'd have to see what I had in memory when it came online. I found a nice empty spot and had War Me-chine start laying out the vehicle factory, a fine blue mist engulfing the area and constructing the building whole cloth from the atomic level up. The GDI officers looked on through a set of electronic binoculars with interest as it came into being from nothing.
It took a few minutes, but then it finished, connected to the power network, and came online.
Instantly those locked designs were available to me and WHATINTHEBLUEBLOODYBLAZES-
I reeled away, physically and mentally, at the design files. They were corrupted. I was
born a full AI. I had more processor power than Atlas had in its entire city locked up in my brain. I couldn't even
begin to unfuck the mess that was their design. The chassis bits I could replicate from sight, but the weapons and armor and all the things that made them useful? Nope. Nope nope nope. Except for one. Well, two, really. The first was a fabrication vehicle, which would come in handy. The second was a small unarmed scout.
Damnit.
I sighed. "Well, the good news is, the factory's ready to go." I said, shunting a couple of fabbers into the build queue, watching nano sprayers built into the construction bay get to work. I had War Me-chine start building the 'Bot Factory' blueprint. Part of the reason for that was wanting to get additional confirmation that my war-bot designs were screwed - but part of that was the fact that even if
these designs were screwed, I
did have recourse for foot soldiers.
Atlesian Knight-200s. Paladin-290s. Guardians. Nightmare Machines. And… well,
me. I had all those designs on file in my
normal memory storage.
"The bad news," I continued, "is that a
lot of the designs are corrupted. I'm gonna have to start on some whole-cloth replacements. I don't figure you guys would have anything with a gun suitable for a tank, would you?"
McNeil looked over his shoulder as, almost on cue, a giant bipedal war walker stomped out of the back of his airship. "We've got a couple of Titans but-"
"Great, I'm stealing that, thanks." I said, and sprinted past them. Their spluttering reply was lost to the wind as I used my long, long legs and fast-moving artificial musculature to eat the distance in moments. I jumped about eight meters straight into the air, landing on the gun-arm of the Titan, unveiled my personal Nano Sprayer, and promptly began seeding the mech with nanomachines whose sole and entire purpose was survey and data collection. Moments later, I had myself a war walker and a gun to stick on something with treads. And the Titan was even unharmed.
I spun off a process to start building a tank for the vehicle fabber to produce from the ground up. No need for an internal fighting compartment, just ammunition storage, a little nano fabber to make more ammunition, a dumb AI core to guide it, and a big friggin' cannon. A hundred-twenty millimeters was going to be too small. I scaled it to a hundred and forty. I could have stuck a copy of Mari's railgun on it, but that would have made it more expensive than I wanted. What I
did do was insert a pair of propellant tanks that would mix behind the projectile and then be ignited by a plasma arc.
Good old electro-thermal chemical propulsion. Steelheart used it.
This thing would be a tank-killer. Sure, it had a coax machinegun, but that was for Emergencies Only. Thus, I dubbed it the Predator. Wide, long and squat, with four independent track systems for mobility and redundancy.
The fourth fabber track ran off the line, and I paused their production, inserting an order for a squadron of Predators. It struck me then - Carmine would be
incredibly jealous if she could see me now, as, likely, would Papa. The thought made me giggle.
Hopping off the Titan with a graceful flip, I rejoined my hosts.
"Thanks for the design, by the by. I wasn't sure if scaling up my own gun to the appropriate size would work or even be a good idea, so I needed some additional data." I said in lieu of an apology.
"I-what-you can't just-" the woman - Gale - stuttered.
"Totally just did." I said, shrugging. "Besides! Lookit!" I said, pointing back at the vehicle fabber. The first Predator was rolling off the line, and
my did it look like a wonderful vision of destruction. It snorted and roared as its cooling systems kicked up a cloud of dust behind it, rolling along on a clattering of treads. "I bring gifts of tanks."
McNeil sighed. "Yeah, okay. Sure. Pretty sure General Solomon won't mind that at all. That tank an AI like you?"
"Nope." I said, shaking my head. "I mean, well,
yes, but it's a
dumb AI. I tell it to solve problem X and it does so, but it doesn't think on its own. It'll learn over time how to do things more efficiently, but I don't think…" I went on, and stopped. Now, the best model for an AI I had was myself and my sisters, so I'd gone in with that model as a base for the tank's. I'd stripped out all the unimportant bits, but left in the heuristic learning algorithms.
Theoretically, it might learn enough someday to become sentient - if it didn't blow up beforehand. "Well, I'm
pretty sure it won't evolve into a full AI."
"Great." he muttered. "What about cyberwar? Can it be hacked?"
Does he know who I- no, wait, no he doesn't. I couldn't help but double over laughing regardless. It devolved into a mad cackle by the end anyway. Gods above, I hate my laugh. "Heh,
nooooo. Back home, I
am the walking computer virus. There was a guy who made something specifically to take over a buncha war droids and a comm system there, and I
smashed his little pet AI virus. Hell, my
big sister did, and she's not as good at it as I am. No way and no how is one of
my machines getting taken over."
"That's… good to know, I guess." he said. I nodded.
Meanwhile, the fabber tracks and War Me-chine finished the bot factory. I had the fabbers spread out, putting up new generators and metal extractors, while looking over the newly unlocked bot designs to discover that, yes, the corruption extended to my warbots. Whatever. Time for a couple battalions of Knight-200s, then. Meanwhile, realizing that riding my own shoulder would be a ridiculous potential waste of resources if someone decided to snipe my avatar, I reconfigured War Me-chine's armored head to hold - very tightly - exactly one me with no room at all for anything else.
"So!" I said, clapping my hands together as the twelfth Predator and the fourth squad of Knights formed up in a loose formation. "Where can I find some Nod jerkoffs to introduce to the concept of brutally efficient self replicating mechanisms of war?"
