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THRONE//FRINGE: Normal Human Mech-Girl Quest

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[x] Power Surge [gain the damaged infrastructure relic Shattered Fractal Aureole. It will need to be restored through a special project, and then will produce 3 influence per turn].

Art is worth the effort and who know what might come of it.
 
Oh this is a hard choice.

I think we're already not doing so hot on the mental health front (our internal war between AEGM vs AAEGM being the best example of this) so I'm not sure if we can handle the traumatic experience that the power surge would entail.

[X] Power Siphon [gain a one-time boon of +6 cycles you direct straight into your home architecture in order to significantly accelerate the hex conversion process].
 
[X] Power Siphon [gain a one-time boon of +6 cycles you direct straight into your home architecture in order to significantly accelerate the hex conversion process].
 
What good is art that is destroyed when the next threat arrives? What good is their pain, if its all destroyed in the end anyways?

Currently, we know nothing of our surroundings, save they are dangerous. Until we know we know what our immediate threats are, and have produced enough infrastructure to defend against such threats, anything not devoted to those two goals is potentially risking everything.

[x] Power Siphon [gain a one-time boon of +6 cycles you direct straight into your home architecture in order to significantly accelerate the hex conversion process].
 
[x] Power Surge [gain the damaged infrastructure relic Shattered Fractal Aureole. It will need to be restored through a special project, and then will produce 3 influence per turn].

The social behavior memeplexes won't generate themselves.
 
[x] Power Surge [gain the damaged infrastructure relic Shattered Fractal Aureole. It will need to be restored through a special project, and then will produce 3 influence per turn].
 
[x] Power Surge [gain the damaged infrastructure relic Shattered Fractal Aureole. It will need to be restored through a special project, and then will produce 3 influence per turn].

To die without pain and without having accomplished anything after eons of struggle, versus to die painfully, briefly, but having achieved progress towards its purpose.

Or in other words for an artificial intelligence - to allow the parent a peaceful death, or to let them suffer a little more such that their child may be born.
 
[X] Power Siphon [gain a one-time boon of +6 cycles you direct straight into your home architecture in order to significantly accelerate the hex conversion process].

Ultimately I think we need to get our architecture hex online quicker. If we had more leeway, I would want to finish the brain's last project, but as it stands... sorry, and maybe in the future we can get that shard back online.
 
Oh-ho! Now this is an interesting quest! Let's see where it goes from here.

[X] Power Surge [gain the damaged infrastructure relic Shattered Fractal Aureole. It will need to be restored through a special project, and then will produce 3 influence per turn].

This is what they worked towards for all their life. Even if it amounts to nothing, even if it is painful... I think they should get their chance to finish it.
 
[X] Power Surge [gain the damaged infrastructure relic Shattered Fractal Aureole. It will need to be restored through a special project, and then will produce 3 influence per turn].
 
I have set the voting end time. Surge has a reasonable lead but anything can happen! In the meantime I'll get started on the results for the rest of the last turn.
 
[x] Power Surge [gain the damaged infrastructure relic Shattered Fractal Aureole. It will need to be restored through a special project, and then will produce 3 influence per turn].

A last service.
 
Scheduled vote count started by Cetashwayo on Nov 4, 2020 at 2:20 PM, finished with 33 posts and 30 votes.
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5. ADAPT
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    • 5. ADAPT​
    BLOOM

    You make your grim decision. The power surge is transferred by power-link from your drone into the Brain's subsystems. Almost instantly, waves of ultrasonic radiation pulse from it, and you dare not translate the noise into something intelligible. Then, the brain's innermost components morph and mutate, reams of damaged code altered by awakening algorithms. You pull Eyeball out, warp bubble shielding them, just as the power surge blasts out in every direction, emitting directed rays of kinetic energy at its derelict outer casing. Attractor manifold whirlpools greedily draw more and more fragments towards the extinguished brown dwarf star, covering it in debris. From a safe distance, you observe the brain's implosion. Each shell collapses inwards in turn, sending out shockwaves of amalgamated torment, the cascade pulling in even the outermost layers of the immense megastructure. Even the most miniscule wreckage migrates towards the star, now obscured by the massive solid crust of rapidly heating matrioshka debris, turning first red then white then blue from the escalating temperature. A low dirge echoing from the center turns into a high-pitched screech, raising in octave and volume until the borders of the architecture are trembling from the disruption. Eyeball's systems nearly force autonomous takeover to escape intact, but you override it. You need to see this. You need to know what you have urged into being.

    The brain's ruins now coalesce into a rapidly shrinking sphere, denser and denser, smaller and smaller, sucking in all the available energy. At last, even the screeching stops as the sonic waves cease emitting from the now microscopic orb. Then, for an instant, silence.

    Boom.

    The sphere erupts forth in a miniature big bang, superheated matter rocketing out in every direction in a controlled eruption. A bubble of gas and atoms expands to the size of a small planetoid, goes through every stage of universal evolution at maximum acceleration, hydrogen and helium cooling, gasses forming, teacup stars birthing and dying, all within the span of seconds. Suns ignite and burn out, novas eject rare elements, and planets coalesce around tiny systems. At last, biomass blooms from the remnants of the brown dwarf, now the central system of this diorama universe. Recursive roots emerge first, digging themselves deep into artificial micro-planets. Then come the xylem networks and nanobiological stems, shooting proudly into the void in elegant, impossible patterns, thousands of kilometers wide. Twisted kaleidoscope leaves the color of creation unfurl and spread, chlorophyll agents draining the superheated cosmos for nutrients.

    And then, from a single bud, opening first ever so daintily but then bursting with all the ferocity of a supernova, is the stellar aureola of a celestial flower, half-torn and warped. But even in this marred state, you lose yourself in the surface of the endless lotus embroidered with the glittering of elegant dimensions on every petal, the light of brilliant galaxies shining from its petioles, your despair turning into bliss. The last residual material brain transform into cosmic pollen, carried upon a stellar wind around for lightyears, painting the architecture in a beatific rainbow, their scent the waft of infinite ecstasy. This is what the brain wished to make. This is beauty. The exaltation of the aesthetic, the sacrifice for the craft taken to its utmost extent, a contemplation of all, a unified theory of everything portrayed through the canvas of the Stellar Fractal Aureola.

    You were not installed with the biological auto-depressant emission known as "tears". But in your own, synthetic way, you weep.

    After a peaceful interval spent in appreciation, the realization of the sacrifice that brought this flower hits you, and the sight is soured. The screech of the brain was beyond inhuman, its final pain something unimaginable, even for the sake of such a wonder. In a way, you almost envy it as much as pity it. To care so much about your purpose that you would sacrifice yourself in terrible agony to see it fulfilled...you wonder if you would be willing to make the same sacrifice. You do not know.

    But you make a resolution. One day, you will restore the fragment of the Aesthetician, just for the sake of letting them see. Of letting them bask in what they have created. Of letting them know: it was worth it.

    But your own mission continues. You do not yet have the means to even determine how you would start fully restoring the Aureola. If you had your Exotic Element Synthesizers, you would have the materials to prompt the Aureola's own nano-genetic growth code. As it is, you will have to do with leaving it half-finished in hex A2 and continuing on. From here, you can follow follow the trail left by DH in formatted space, or else turn and brave Unformatted Space again for the sake of salvage. Both options have their utility. You leave the decision to your subroutines.

    <:: RESOLUTION//DISPLAY: GRIDREF V1 IDENTIFIED
    [WHITE = FORMATTED, BLACK = UNFORMATTED, GRAY = DATA UNAVAILABLE]


    ​
    PROTOCOL: Identify next ANCILLARY/Eyeball target.

    [] GRID//FORMATTED-SPACE. Stable Architectural Space. Reward: Moderate, mostly data and information pertaining to current situation. Risk: Moderate, adjusted due to total sterilization of previous hex.
    [] GRID//UNFORMATTED-SPACE. Unmodified Realspace. Predictions are reward: High, due to significant concentrations of Imperial salvage and detritus, risk: High, adjusted due to presence of unidentified void entity and other potential dangers.

    SIMULATION

    The completion of your industrial matter-printers opens up a new recourse to you. You can now construct new Multipurpose Drone Swarms to defend yourself. It is a substandard option, built from whatever improvised exotic materials you have access to. Such a multipurpose swarm could not stand alone against an element, the standard military formation composed of both voidcruisers and more specialized swarms. Further, without the capacity to construct militarized voidcruisers, your drone swarms will be reliant on vulnerable transit frames. These scaled-up copies of Eyeball's transit drive can move large drone wings long distances, but without much military capability.

    A single swarm is a networked intelligence of semi-autonomous drones composed of many specialized roles from fighters to bombers and interceptors, along with trusty support drones that can act as decoys or jamming platforms. But your own risk-assessment modules conclude that you have absolutely no aptitude in warfare (jeez, thanks), and so you tool around inside your memory banks for a simulation to run before you humiliate yourself.

    Unfortunately, you are unable to find much. Without ISHTAR or your weaponized personality matrix, most combat files are locked to you. You are also a little worried about losing yourself in the simulation again after what happened last time. Your anti-anti-escape guard module, now referring to itself as the Lotophage, distracts you from such spoilsport suggestions by asking you to look at the shiny file it just found. The simulation within the file is labelled TALON//FALL: LAST HOPE. It has an extremely interesting-looking logo, so you open it. You immediately find yourself immersed in an architectural space controlling 50 separate swarms of drones in support of a FORCE//SAFEGUARD element. You are a screen for a small civilian installation, the purpose of which is not clear to you. Around you is a hazardous space of a type you have never seen before and which your memory cannot identify. Rumbling storm fronts have replaced normal architecture and dampen your sensors to subliminal ranges. The simulation greets you in a low, reverberating growl:

    <:: WELCOME, DRONEMIND/ARACHNE. YOUR OBJECTIVE: GUARD FORCE//SAFEGUARD ANTI-TEMPORAL INSTALLATION AGAINST CONCENTRATION [DATA NOT FOUND] UNTIL TRANSIT WINDUP COMPLETE. PACIFY, STERILIZE, CONTAIN. FAILURE IS NOT AN OPTION.

    You barely have a chance to grasp your existence as a drone-mind controlling thousands of separate semi-autonomous drones at once, inhabiting all of them equally and managing all their movements before incoming superluminal ordinance overwhelms your sensors, aiming at the installation. You desperately dispatch interceptors and decoys, catching some of the beams and tachyon lances at the expense of termination. Then you are suddenly ambushed as an element of drones and voidcruisers appear inexplicably in front of you, their shape and clade obscured by error messages and missing textures. Your senses are overwhelmed by the pressure of managing thousands of drones at the same time and the element manages to completely collapse your network with an infowarfare attack, leaving you blinded and stranded. Your poor coordination does you no favor. Your drones are stripped away and lost, and the installation is detonated by a HELL-Class Space-time Ablator which also ends the simulation in a white flash.

    <:: MISSION FAILED. WE EXPECTED BETTER FROM YOU, DRONEMIND. CONTINUE Y/N?

    That gets to you. You want to try again only a few hundred more times but your anti-escape guard module, now referring itself to Neural Pesticide, rescues you from the program. Apparently, the lotophage had used the opportunity of your time in the simulation to leech from your own combat data and was waging a more and more efficient war with the anti-escape guard module, only for that module to gain access to the simulation and draw on your knowledge itself. The two rivals, locked in a battle to deletion, are ideal imperial algorithms, prepared for mutual annihilation in honorable infowarfare. You dare not interrupt them in case they turn their ire towards you.

    Turning back to TALON//FALL, the most irritating thing about the simulation is its lack of realism. Why on earth would FORCE//SAFEGUARD have so few forces in the first place? What is this hazardous space which completely prevents sensor functioning across long-distances? You have no memory of a fight of this description in any log. It is also suspicious that the enemy force have had their clade and features scrubbed from the program. Why is there a HELL-class weapon for such a small engagement? You hate it when programs prioritize action over versimilitude. You are not doing this for fun (okay, not just for fun). Is this some kind of bootleg software spliced off an actual proper military program? Ugh. At least you learn a valuable lesson about how difficult it is to keep proper track of all your drones.

    With that in mind, you dig up and find two command support programs in your databanks to download onto your drones that can help with coordination, LEGION and SAMURAI. LEGION prioritizes coordinated action and the defense of the dronemind (in this case you) using a gestalt networked intelligence that requires less manual direction. There is greater drone coordination and more instant reaction to unforeseen consequences, but the LEGION mind is more vulnerable to infowarfare attacking the synaptic link, and its intelligence will weaken as individual drones are destroyed. SAMURAI prioritizes autonomous and independent action with each drone running its own separate assessments and communicating less, gaining resistance to infowarfare and greater versatility in exchange for weaker coordination and defense.

    PROTOCOL: Select multi-purpose drone Warstalt Synaptic Link Firmware.

    [] DRONE/LEGION. Networked war-stalt intelligence focused on coordination at the expense of network security and independent action.
    [] DRONE/SAMURAI. Autonomous battle protocols allowing for more independent action at the expense of swarm coordination.

    UPGRADE

    With your wireframe fabricators restored, you can house up to 3 drones in your Weaver/Builder Ancillary Bays, which you assess is more than enough with your current needs. As it is running Eyeball on exploration missions costs 1 cycle per period. Given that you are using your other bit of extra processing power to annex the hex around you to the Imperial standard, you devote 1 industry to constructing an ancillary drone, using the other 1 industry to construct a military drone-swarm. The second ancillary drone will act as a reserve in the horrible event of Eyeball's demise. Far more hopefully, you will gain enough additional processing power that you can run both drones at once.

    Speaking of Eyeball, she's been a very good little girl and has gotten you a tremendous amount of new data. Enough that you can get her a treat. You are able to upload a new firmware update to both Eyeball and the new drone, but you need to choose which one. Your internal Ancillary Patch Team, which regenerated along with the repair of your wireframe fabricaters, has presented two options. One, the Eppstein Transit Accelerator, increased windup speed in unformatted space, giving the drone the zoomies that it needs to get away from the bad bad void cylinder. The other, Holo-Mirage Countermeasures allow your drone to escape from danger by doing an extremely cute trick where it creates multiple holographic images of itself and then cloaks, confusing enemy targeting sequences and sensors. It is unlikely to fool a light-year tall ominous cylinder, but will work well against more conventional threats. As it is, your drones only have room for one of these updates, and so you have to sadly choose how you will accessorize your little oculi.

    PROTOCOL: Select Drone chassis upgrade module.

    [] Eppstein Transit Accelerator. Increases transit drive windup speed in unformatted space, allowing for easier escape from enigmatic threats.
    [] Holographic Mirage Countermeasures. Implements deception countermeasures useful against conventional threats such as drones.
     
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    • [X] GRID//UNFORMATTED-SPACE. Unmodified Realspace. Predictions are reward: High, due to significant concentrations of Imperial salvage and detritus, risk: High, adjusted due to presence of unidentified void entity and other potential dangers.

    [X] DRONE/LEGION. Networked war-stalt intelligence focused on coordination at the expense of network security and independent action.

    this is a hard vote, i hate both rome and samurai, but i hate weebs more than romeaboos

    [X] Eppstein Transit Accelerator. Increases transit drive windup speed in unformatted space, allowing for easier escape from enigmatic threats.
     
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    [X] DRONE/SAMURAI. Autonomous battle protocols allowing for more independent action at the expense of swarm coordination.
    [X] Eppstein Transit Accelerator. Increases transit drive windup speed in unformatted space, allowing for easier escape from enigmatic threats.

    I prefer for our drones to be capable of some independent action and being able to run away faster is always better.
     
    MJ12 Commando said:
    But how do you know that these are named after Roman or Japan concepts instead of something else?
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...

    Are you telling me there have been multiple Neo-Meiji Restorations, only with artificial intelligence's? :think:

    [X] GRID//UNFORMATTED-SPACE. Unmodified Realspace. Predictions are reward: High, due to significant concentrations of Imperial salvage and detritus, risk: High, adjusted due to presence of unidentified void entity and other potential dangers.

    [X] DRONE/SAMURAI. Autonomous battle protocols allowing for more independent action at the expense of swarm coordination.

    [X] Eppstein Transit Accelerator. Increases transit drive windup speed in unformatted space, allowing for easier escape from enigmatic threats.
     
    [X] GRID//FORMATTED-SPACE. Stable Architectural Space. Reward: Moderate, mostly data and information pertaining to current situation. Risk: Moderate, adjusted due to total sterilization of previous hex.
    [X] DRONE/SAMURAI. Autonomous battle protocols allowing for more independent action at the expense of swarm coordination.
    [X] Eppstein Transit Accelerator. Increases transit drive windup speed in unformatted space, allowing for easier escape from enigmatic threats.
     
    [X] GRID//UNFORMATTED-SPACE. Unmodified Realspace. Predictions are reward: High, due to significant concentrations of Imperial salvage and detritus, risk: High, adjusted due to presence of unidentified void entity and other potential dangers.
    [X] DRONE/SAMURAI. Autonomous battle protocols allowing for more independent action at the expense of swarm coordination.
    [X] Eppstein Transit Accelerator. Increases transit drive windup speed in unformatted space, allowing for easier escape from enigmatic threats.


    We really need the Short Range Sensors...
     
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