The military transport truck stopped at the entrance of the spaceport at four in the morning. A nervous scientist took the wheel and handed the authorization document to the young soldier guarding the roadblock.
"I'm sorry, sir, but this authorization is for tomorrow's launch, not today."
The scientist replied: "The equipment I am carrying will be used for launch and needs to be prepared." He looked around uneasily, but his nerves had given him away. The soldier looked unconvinced.
"I'm sorry, sir, without formal authorization, I can't—"
The door to the guardroom opened and another soldier walked in. His insignia identifies him as a Special Forces soldier with the rank of sergeant major.
"Boy, I got this," the officer said. He turned and looked at the scientist. "Done?"
The scientist suppressed his nervousness and nodded. "The DNA of you, your man, your wife and your children is at the back. You are all labeled as the first clones."
"What on earth is he talking about?" said the doorman.
The sergeant major smiled and put his arm around the guard's shoulders. "You have nothing to worry about. But I want you to know that I'm really sorry."
The officer stepped back quickly, took out his pistol from his belt holster, and shot the guard between the eyebrows. The scientist jumped up in horror, but the officer ignored him. He came out and whistled softly. A truck started moving and drove up to the gate. Two soldiers jumped out, grabbed the dead guard and threw him into the back of the truck. One man was left to guard the post, and the officer and scientist climbed into the cab together.
"Oh my gosh, oh my gosh," the scientist said.
"Calm down, kid. My men will clear the way and hold the fort. Enter the rocket yourself. I assume the good doctor is behind?"
The scientist nodded convulsively.
"Well, I guess you've got about two hours before you're going to be in trouble. You'd better leave before then. You've brought some very precious cargo with you."
Saku
a took several days to hand over production and mining control to Saku
a, develops a new schedule and discusses improvements to her plan. For the most part, I just agreed with what she wanted to do. I did refuse to let her build a battle droid arena, even though she claimed it would increase the morale of the drones.
Saku
a promised to set up a factory capable of producing circuit boards within a month, which was a full five months ahead of my schedule. She also noted that production of industrial ceramics and advanced glass for fiber optics only has three months left. In between, we could start producing new drones in a matter of months, rather than just rebuilding old ones. They will have to use nickel-cadmium batteries instead of graphene batteries because we can't yet produce the carbon nanotubes needed to make graphene. But overall, I'm happy with the direction she's going.
Agrippa, on the other hand, was busy conducting tactical simulations and formulating defensive strategies. Him and Saku
A coordinated effort to assign mining drones to cut new entrances and defensible passages. I have drawn up blueprints for the new entrance, including five-meter-thick steel walls, multiple armored blast doors, and what looks like a cave from the outside. Recessed entryway. I arranged for construction drones to begin sealing the entrance tunnel once the new entrance was completed. Access will pass through the old tunnel and connect to the production grid, with a 10-meter-high solid steel wall separating the tunnel from the outside. Over time, the surface 400 meters will be filled in with waste rock, slag and debris, with occasional steel beams added to reinforce the rubble.
It's time to explore the alien spaceship. I leave the drone in place, in standby mode, so that I don’t have to waste time waiting for the drone to move when I’m ready. I reconnected them and was about to start when Agrippa called to me.
"Nicholas, are you exploring alien spacecraft?" he asked.
"I'm just going," I replied. “Would you be interested in hitching a ride on drone sensors?”
"Indeed," he replied. "I wanted as much first-hand experience as possible. After all, know your enemy."
I shared the drone videos and put them all online. My drones are all in the control room, unchanged from the last time I looked. The dead alien plants are not brown, but gray. I could see what a face lay behind the vines, its wooden eyes staring blankly through the curtain of dry leaves that had formerly hidden it.
"Mind if I use a drone to check out the camp and the bodies?" Agrippa asked.
"That's good. I'll salvage the laser drill and other equipment. Please don't damage them, they may be useful," I replied.
I had the dead vines hauled out of the control room and placed in a storage pod on the first branch so I could work unhindered. Most of what I wanted to see was hidden behind the wall panels. The control panel is a large block that houses everything except the buttons, which are hidden in a metal cabinet. The fusion reactor won't move until I fully understand it. If damaged in the wrong way, it could end my exam in explosive fashion. The oil cans in the room were labeled "Fuel" with a subtitle that I couldn't decipher, possibly the exact chemical name of the element inside.
To know anything, I had to see the beast's bones with my own eyes. I pointed a drone camera at the wall panel and discovered a square indented screw. This is unusual for human construction, but maybe that's their standard. I put a utility drone in there and found a square drill bit that fit well enough. After some trial and error I learned that their screws are counterclockwise. The more I looked, the more I realized they were a lot like us. Well, just like humans. Am I human? That question still bothers me. Once again, I pushed the thought aside.
It takes about 1 hour to remove all the wall panels and the control panel cabinet casing. Inside, I found the main lode. I documented every square centimeter of the countless wires, cables, pipes and conduits I found inside without touching a thing. There were a lot of wires running down to the floor and up to the ceiling, so I had the wall panel moved to one of the tree branches. I also took the floor and ceiling apart. On the floor I found a service tunnel leading under the reactor, with doors leading to the four engines. On the ceiling, I found a panel full of circular rocker switches, neatly labeled. I could only read a third of the label, but it was enough to recognize that this was the craftsmanship of their main breaker. This was helpful since I needed to cut the power supply to disassemble the electronics without damaging them. I kept journaling, saving everything for further inspection.
A few hours passed as I slowly made my way through the control room. At one point, Agrippa's drone returned to examine the laser attached to the bottom of the first branching pod. I started to get a good grasp of how ships were wired and what their color conventions were. Orange, green and brown are three-phase electricity. The yellow wire is the ground wire and the gray wire is the neutral wire. Data cables are sky blue and infrastructure cables are light pink. The water pipe is light green and the fuel pipe is orange. The designer part of me enjoys seeing other people's toys, even though I hated their previous owners.
Finally, when I was sure I could turn off the breaker without damaging anything, I started flipping the switches until the light on the control board went off. One of my data center robots went to work, first with a voltmeter to make sure there was no current flowing, then with a screwdriver and camera. Inside, I started to find parts that looked a bit like the inside of a computer. I found what might have been data storage media, and some sort of processor. Many components are manufactured as individual components. I recorded them from every direction, trying to capture every circuit, transistor, and capacitor. But now I've reached the limit of disassembly without destroying it, and I have no good way to access the data storage media. I needed a disposable part to cut open so I could see inside.
I sent a drone into the fourth branch's warehouse to look for spare parts. Now that I knew what I was looking for, I started checking the containers. Not long after, I hit the jackpot. Additional memory blocks, processor units and spare circuit board replacements. I carefully documented each one and packed them back into their storage boxes before taking them back to the transport drone.
Now that I had my main treasure, I started loading the loot onto the transport ship. Alien TVs from the living quarters, every personal electronic device, every piece of equipment, every piece of technology that isn't fixed, and some are. At Agrippa's request, I also removed the defensive laser and loaded it. I need a lab and a lot of time to do this.
I'm in heaven. I was a postdoctoral fellow at the MIT School of Engineering and was brought in as a consultant by Boston Dynamics. The principal investigator was called, but he was my postdoctoral advisor, so I followed him. Boston Dynamics has been a pioneer in advanced robotics and has been an industry leader for decades. I adore this company and the robots they invented.
My mentor had been working there for 20 years before he decided to take his current job at MIT. We were together in the belly of the largest robot I had ever seen. This is a purpose-built machine contracted by NASA. It's a proof-of-concept robot that could be placed on Mars or the Moon to scoop up regolith, add water, and bake it into bricks. These bricks protect the building from the permanent hazards of radiation. But this is not a simple matter. The robot can also build structures and repair almost any part of itself. Only, despite all the engineering models saying it should work, its core function—shoveling away regolith and baking bricks—failed miserably.
We spent hours inside the belly of this huge machine, studying every gear, every bolt. Finally, it was too late and we could think no more. We climbed out and sat down at a nearby table, gratefully gulping down water and eating cookies that had been left for us.
"I just need a few minutes," I said. “Let these foods give me a chance to refuel and I’ll be ready to go back.”
My mentor laughed. "Oh, I wish I still had your energy. Hey, don't you have a new husband waiting for you at home?"
I made a face. "I guess so. Do you think I should call him?"
"I would if I were you," he replied. "What does he do, if you don't mind me asking?"
"He's an associate professor of biblical studies at Boston Baptist College," I said, with a hint of bitterness in my voice. "My mom loves him."
"That's a good thing, isn't it?"
"My mom and I..."We don't agree...on anything," I said.
"What? You don't even have a husband? You married him after all."
"Yeah, I did. Hey, I think I can go back. Can you keep up, old guy?"
He smiled. "No, but I'm going to give it a try in college."
"I need a lab," I said out loud. Well, via radio.
"Well, about that," Sakura interjected. I looked up and looked around the room where we stood. We never left the room. I never left the room. Sakura often flies around in a drone, ostensibly checking on construction while working. I think she's secretly pretending to be a cowboy or something; she's been watching old western movies for the past week. She even asked Agrippa to observe them in real time with her. When I asked her why, she said she wanted to "get the full effect."
"So what?" I asked, finally turning my attention away from the interface. Recently, I took over one wall of the room and used it as a convenient backdrop, hanging a dozen or so screens scrolling with various journals, design schematics, and whatever I was most busy with at the time. Of course, Sakura and Agrippa couldn't see it, but they liked the idea and put it into practice.
Sakura looked at me, kicking one leg and putting her hands behind her back. She looked like one of my daughters about to admit she had done something.
"What did you do, Sakura?" I asked, injecting a bit of my mother's voice into my voice.
"I may have made you one..." she said slowly, and then hurriedly: "...one for Agrippa and one for me."
"Oh! That's great news! It saves a lot of time. Wait, did you mean the Batcave?"
I didn't think a faceless robot would look shyer or more apologetic, but I was wrong. "I just wanted a place of my own, and I loved Batman, so I decided to build myself a Batcave. I wanted to paint it pink, put in a projector so I could watch movies, and have My own space...and..."
Sakura's voice became smaller and smaller, and I was speechless. I vacillated between shock and laughter, not sure whether either reaction was the right one. She took it as an encouragement.
"But I feel sorry that I didn't do anything for you and Agrippa, so I decided that you should have your own space too, and when you finally get around to taking the spaceship apart, you're going to take care of all the things on the spaceship. You brought everything, so I made a lab for you?" She asked one last question.
My LED face definitely showed shock, but I forced a smile. "Sakura, you are so thoughtful. This will be very helpful."
I thought frantically for a few microseconds, throwing all my computing resources at it in an instant. This is what it took more than 75 years to build Ga
ymed's NI, a perfect worker bee, behaves exactly as expected. She was never designed to behave any other way. Not only is she now showing personality, which was evident from the moment I let her into the entertainment library, but she is also now showing personal initiative. it's out of the question.
But she has been trapped in a cocoon without any information that is not relevant to the mission. Perhaps they did this to ensure the reliability of NI-19 intelligence. Had I broken the most useful tool I own? I mentally shook my head. Sakura is not a tool; she and I are completely one person. Is she human? My conclusion is, absolutely not. She has her own artificial intelligence and happily operates thousands of drones and hundreds of factories in a way that no human can. But she is an independent and emotional person after all. If I tried to put that intelligence into the mold that made her, that's how I'd break her. I made a decision I didn't even realize I was considering.
"Sakura," I started. She hung her head, ready to piss me off. "I don't want you to devote more than five, no, even ten percent of your computing resources to your hobby at any one time," I said. "As long as it doesn't affect my work efficiency, I can accept my hobbies."
She looked up at me, frozen, no doubt surprised. Then I heard a high-pitched scream that could have come from any teenage human girl. "Really?!?! Oh my god, thank you, Nikolai, you are the best! Thank you, thank you, thank you!"
"Well, if you don't mind my interjection," said Agrippa, "I wish I had the same leeway in my own computing resources."
I turned to Agrippa and was surprised for the second time. He shrugged awkwardly and said, "I want to start experimenting with hydroponics and gardening now that we can produce glass and see what, if anything, we can grow here." I think if we were to clone humans, We have to be able to feed them. "
I laughed again. "Sure, Aki. If you want, that's cool."
"Thank you," he said. "The thought of growing something...is comforting. I'm going to give it a try."
"Oh," Sakura said, "don't worry I can multitask. I can split my attention and work on 17 different projects at the same time."
It's interesting. I can't do that. "I'm glad to hear you say that. Is your upper limit seventeen?"
"Yeah," she said nonchalantly, "unless you give me more processors and more memory. Then I can do more. Hey, do you want to see your lab?"
"I do, yes," I said.
"You'd better retreat to the door," she said.
When we were safely on either side of the room, smoke and a line of fire in the shape of a doorway appeared in the middle of the wall opposite the room's entrance. Within moments, the cutting was complete and the drone was hauling away the metal door.
Saku
A said: "We may need to let it cool down for a few minutes."
"Let the smoke clear," added Agrippa.
When it was safe, I walked out into the hallway. Three doors face the corridor; one opposite the newly cut door frame and one at each end of the hall.
"Your lab is straight ahead, Agrippa's is on the right, and mine is on the left," Sakura said.
I turned to the right into Agrippa's space. It was a big place, twenty meters by twenty meters, which seemed to be flush with the front of our house, for lack of a better word. There is a large table on one side, the metal walls are painted a warm green, the floor is a dark brown, and the high ceiling is a light greenish white. The charging station is mounted on one wall, with a large door on the other wall. I turned to Sakura.
"You know how to make enamel paint?"
She shrugged. "I don't get it. We have formulas, and some drone designs require a protective enamel coating that's both durable and beautiful. We have a paint shop open now. Any other color is available except cobalt blue. The results are always It's gray, so I think there's a typo in the recipe. That door leads outside and you can bring whatever you need in. We all have one."
Agrippa seemed pleased with the place. "I can project holograms onto the table to help with three-dimensional strategy, and there's plenty of room for hydroponics. Can we discuss what I need later, Sakura?"
"Of course," she said, and led us down the hall to her "Batcave." I opened the door expecting a dark, brooding space. What I got instead was a hint of pink. The walls are a deep pink and the floors are a rich lavender. In contrast, the ceiling is black and lights are strategically placed around the walls to provide the room with indirect light. The room was as large as Agrippa's, but more furnished. One end of the room is filled with benches and various parts, and a CNC milling machine sits next to another exterior door. Fiber optics and circuit boards were scattered among a jumble of unidentifiable components. The other end of the room is filled with three chairs and a large section of the wall is painted matte white.
"Isn't it great?" Sakura said enthusiastically. “Now we have a place for movie nights!”
"We don't have movie nights," Agrippa said.
"It didn't happen before, but now it does!"
"I guess so," I said. "Where's the one over there?"
"Don't ruin my surprise," she said. "Let's take a look at your lab."
I saved my lab for last because I doubt I'll be back for a while. As soon as I saw it, I knew I was right. If you had asked me beforehand, I would have guessed that of the three rooms, she spent the most time in hers. How wrong I was.
My lab space extends about 5 meters from the hall and into a large room that takes up the entire rear of the house. The walls are not metal, but white ceramic, which perfectly matches my robot body. Black glass lines wrap around the tops of the walls, concealing the seams between the floors and ceilings, and textured steel floors have also been painted black. Large square lights on the ceiling are covered with white glass panels to diffuse the light, perfectly illuminating rows of metal tables painted in white ceramic. Tools are hung neatly on the wall, empty shelves are mounted on the wall, and drawers are conveniently placed next to the bench. In one corner there is a modern classic architect desk with a steel stool and a small shelf.
"So...what do you think?" Sakura asked timidly.
"It's perfect," I said. "How long have you been working on this?"
"Oh, a few weeks," she said. "It's easy to hide because there's no airborne sound, and I still go to the factory regularly for inspections. You two never leave. I mean, who would do that? You're always hiding inside. You should get out more often." .”
"Sakura," I interrupted. She stopped and turned to me. "Thank you. This is amazing."
I could see her literally shaking with excitement at the compliment. She turned and walked toward the outer door of my new lab.
"I have two more things to show you," she said, her tone unusually calm. She opened the door and on the other side was a drone. This is a basic wheeled transport drone with the same tread design we use on our HM2 heavy dozer variety around heavy miners. It took me a moment to realize that this was a small LM2 light dozer that we hadn't built yet.
"What about you?" I started.
“Yes!! The drone manufacturing equipment is online, almost online. This is one of the successes of the testing phase, I have a bunch of things to work out, but we are very close! I have the semiconductor factory and components Factories are coming online so we can make processors, sensors, memory and everything! Look in that bucket!”
The front of the bulldozer has a wide, flat, toothed bucket, just like bulldozers used for centuries. Inside is a giant, delicate rectangle of blue optical fiber, made of silicon and gold, the size of which would fit in a data center's server rack. This is a cortical unit.
"I hand-built it in my Batcave because we still had a few months to finish the factory. I wanted to put an NI-5 in it to manage the drone factory. When it came online, we It will be able to output 15 light drones or three heavy drones every day. I estimate that we can double industrial output in four months and tenfold in eight months.”
Sakura stood there, asking for my permission again. It was strange to see this entity, which had outlasted my human life by decades and outlived my digital life many times over, acting so young. I realized that she wasn't just looking for approval, she was looking for her mother's approval. She is older, sure, but emotionally she is no different than the teenager who now only exists in my memory. I know what she needs to hear.
"Sakura, you have created miracles, your work is incredible." I turned around and stood in front of her, looking down at her face slightly. "I'm so proud of you."
Agrippa added: "That's great, Sakura. It's just, unbelievable."
This is a strange moment for me. I realized I was more than just the ruler here. I am the head of a new kind of family; a matriarch who has founded a new tribe dedicated to protecting and rebuilding humanity. I have a daughter and a loyal lieutenant. We will be adding more members soon. At this moment, I don’t doubt my humanity. At this moment, I was just immersed in the joy of Sakura's victory. I will return to my concerns soon because we still have a long road ahead of us. But for the first time since I woke up on this asteroid, I feel like we've achieved our first milestone in the mission. We are replicating ourselves.
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