Upon Regaining consciousness, I knew several things.

The sun should have hurt my eyes. They'd been open long enough that I had trouble closing them. I was laying down on a rock with a slight inclination at my feet. It was a fairly comfortable rock, very smooth, no loose pebbles to bother me. For a time that was the extent of my knowledge.

Wait a minute. Sol isn't supposed to be that shade of yellow and red.

I was also getting a little hungry.

I finally lifted my head up and started to take a look around. I was looked at great, white, rolling summer clouds set against a rich, emerald green sky with a rocky desert landscape going on as far as I could see in all directions. Somehow this did not seem to be within expectations.

I wasn't wondering where I was: I was still working on the who, and half-heartedly toying with the why. I had a feeling I was going to be sorry that I bothered.

I was – sorry that is, for when full reconciliation burst upon me I sat bolt upright with my eyes open at the full wonder of how fucked I could possibly be.

I did not fall asleep at the beach. I don't sleep with my eyes open. I don't drink, so there was no way a couple of guys at the bar had dragged my ass out here and dumped me. Nobody hated me enough for that. I didn't have a headache. I had the feeling that I should. I was in the desert. And there was no road.

In my right hand was an object that looked like a book, 7X5X1 inches, black as polished coal and yet completely cool, grey where the paper should be. It looked like a hardcover book but it was made of some very advanced materials and charged in sunlight. It contained a complete working copy of the internet. So it was not my kindle. It even had information that had been deleted from the internet. And I could access information from other countries that our government kept its citizens from looking at. I didn't need to pay to look at super porn and all the perverted stuff you can never find. There was even information from other people's computers on there as well as videos that were never uploaded. Plus a whole bunch of, you know, other crap. Like instruction manuals to build nuclear weapons and diseases using only a few thousand dollars and some stuff you could get from the hardware store.

How did I know that? Apparently I was having memory issues.

Kay. . . .

Near my left hand was a Supreme Planetary Annihilation's Commander, Experimental, Zeno-Nano Grade 7B.

Because someone was obviously fucking with me.

It was a black alien monster with a red visor for a sensory organ. I got a read on the thing and fuck physics and myself with a cactus!

You know how the Emergency Medical Holographic Doctor's mobile holo-emitter was a piece of 29th century technology designed as a wholly self-contained holographic projector, generating the photons and force fields necessary to allow him to physically interact with its environment and go on away missions? Well this creature has over 100 trillion wormholes, each the size of an electron, projecting a force field thingy that rearranged atoms in the desired forms and held them there without flying apart or exploding. These atoms then formed cell structures, one to every wormhole, pretending to be cells, which together make a body that is just so mind-fuckingly bullshit that I need Q to drop me off a dictionary like right the fuck now for a new language it invented just to describe how large the toilet is. Its energy output is so large that it just doesn't register. I mean it clocked, but then I got lost counting the zeros.

Commanders are supposed to be made of metal! They're supposed to be equipped with all kinds of weapons and resource cores and nanomachine deployment systems and Omni-sensors and everything else. This thing was less like a shark and more like a Tardigrade. This thing was designed less to be an unstoppable self-replicating machine of war and more like something that was designed to survive the apocalypse in various forms. Each energy force-field cell-like thingy was slightly different and insured that whatever killed off the rest of it would not kill off all of it, allowing it to regenerate forever. The rest of itself was located in another dimension and looked like a self-supporting network of anti-energy.

I suppose that was one way to acquire bullshit science fiction metals: just rearrange your atoms into the proper configuration and hold them there.

Armored Commander Units are bullshit. But you knew that.

Plus it was only about three feet tall. It looked like a die-cast model for a comic con. Solid. Until it started moving, like some weird Clay-Animation special effect.

Okay, one, how the fuck did I know all that, and two, since when do humans have Omni-sensors of their own?

Give me a minute to look around here. I'd just got up and I don't have coffee.

…

I found a thing.

I have a brain implant. Pretty high grade too, I think. Someone went the extra mile because I was starting to feel like next year's model of Transhumanist ready for the floor show.

Thank you ROB.

I shook my head. Nope. Not dreaming.

I had much better all-round vision. There were some words on the book-like thing in my hand. Mostly it said, "Complete copy of Human knowledge, era 2016" but the words were so small that a human with good eyesight would still need a microscope to see them.

Also, lots more colors. There were all kinds of grey and blacks in my vision like a bad camera, but that was because my human brain wasn't yet ready to know of any other colors yet. The color wheel is an artifact of human vision, which has only three colors to see. I have lots more, I think. Jury still out on the details.

I had an "I knew kung Fu" moment as my eyeballs came online. I had a HUD. My eyes said, "Mantis-shrimp Composite Vision Mode Engaged." That's how I knew that.

So yes, my eyes are artificial. Which is why they weren't burned out when I was looking up at the sun while I was in a coma.

Let's see…

Mantis Vision System or MVS:

Although some of the amazement of the Mantis Shrimp eyeball structure have been debunked, it was still an amazing visual system for any animal to have and the name stuck.

Considered the owners of the most complex eyesight in the entire animal kingdom, with its trinocular vision, its multitude of visual pigments, its polarization sensitivity, and its intricate movements due to its placement on mobile eyestalks, it truly is the greatest and most specialized and most sophisticated natural eye in the animal kingdom of our little world, and may still outperform our own artificial creations.

As good as the Mantis Shrimp's eyes are, I'd done better because mine were designed, not evolved.

Just one of my eyes is physically larger than the Mantis Shrimp's two tiny eyes combined. The differentiating structures of the eyeballs found in the animal kingdom offered many options for improvement. Your average eyeball is composed of three fundamental components – the lens, the retina, and the optic nerve. My eyes had their nerves and blood vessels wired up properly with everything behind the retina and lenses, and with no blind spots either, enhancing image quality remarkably.

You know, of course, that Human vision is binocular. That is, we need both eyes working in tandem to see things from two angles, which allows us to perceive depth. Close one eye, and suddenly the world goes flat.

So I had a cheat – I had a partially organic, mostly cybernetic, series of Wormhole Generators lined up in parallel along my spine that I used for many things but in this instance as a part of my sensory apparatus. The actual range and number of the wormholes I could create at any one time was limited – but what an advantage they represented!

Due to the nature of manipulated space-time, each is essentially a camera lens too small to be seen by the Human eye which needs to take hundreds of photos in many different spots in a given area to gather the same amount of light as a handheld camera. (Pfft! A trivial matter when 2 trillion photos per worm-cam were being taken a second and processed in real-time!) This deficiency, however, is compensated for by the omnidirectional nature of the camera and the holographic composite of the images gathered.

I can span the wormholes outwards around my body for incredible depth perception; see everything all around me, from every angle, in every spectrum. They had the ability to replace every other data-gathering instrument by placing remote viewpoints literally anywhere in space: cameras, microphones, science sensors and even medical probes. The wormholes enabled me to move my viewpoint in any direction, even living bodies and into building materials to look at atoms.

So what types of things do I see? Well, aside from its role as a multi-visual system, the wormhole cameras are mainly used to perceive depth, obviously, but primarily the general recognition of forms and motion of objects, not color vision. Half of the worm-cams are focused on sensing one short wavelength of light (such as blue ultraviolet), while the other half of the group is dedicated to sensing long wavelengths of light (such as red for heat vision). This is similar to the compound eyes of many insects and other crustaceans.

My true eyes were a gold color like some human/beast anime Character from Go Nagai's Devil Lady TV series. Damn!

16 visual pigments, with 10 visual pigments for the detection of color, as well as additional classes of visual pigments for sensing the polarization and distribution of light and a bunch of other stuff that would allow me to see things that Humans either would not perceive (at all) or only as simple glare. This intense color sensing platform is then protected using a complex filtering system divided into tiers, so that the color of light can be adjusted for local conditions as it passes through. These color filters are mostly carotenoid compounds whose colors are purple, blue, red, orange or yellow and kran (a color only I can see as semi-transparent but which Humans think is solid) function in tuning and sharpening the wavelength range of light that reaches the visual pigments beneath. Enough to outperform the Mantis Shrimp in the functionality, or close enough that it made no difference.

The color filters, like sunglasses, markedly reduce the level of light that reaches the visual pigments, which explained why I was not so disconcerted with staring at the sun. It did no damage.

Polarized light is probably most famous to Humans for being the thing we use sunglasses to blot out, and the thing that makes the new better 3-D theater stuff possible. Basically, light waves normally just sort of vibrate at random, but polarized light waves only go in one direction. Light can also be circularly polarized, spinning around like a drill on its way to your eyeballs. Humans can see it because we've developed advanced technology that allows us to investigate the phenomenon, plus the Mantis Shrimp because they are awesome.

And to keep this all in perspective, visual processing seems to be done within the mechanism of the vision system itself before sending that information on in a parallel manner from multiple retinal data streams to different parts of my brain in order to reduce the time required for analysis.

Past attempts at multi-sensor fusion in Earth's warriors with Heads Up Displays and in online games have met with limited success because of the limited processing power of Homo Sapiens, and the rigidity of non-sentient data processing systems for building security systems. With my advanced brain, nervous system, new eyes and the wormhole cameras working together, I can meld all the sensor feeds into an all-inclusive, almost god-like unified perspective of my environment. I can send worm-cam viewpoints through walls and look around corners, even see the back of my own head.

If an enemy tries to attack me with a long-ranged weapons system, I will have identified the enemy's weaponry before they have a chance to use them. Indeed, the awareness I have achieved of my surroundings enabled me to identify potential enemies and have multiple responses in place before the enemy is even aware that he is already in battle against me.

So there was that.

End of vision system explanation.

I put my hand on my stomach and found that I was still kind of fat. I didn't hurt anymore, anywhere. My new improved self was created in my own image, derived from many secret desires and holding the ideals that the Human race perceived as good. I would still be superior to any natural hominid in terms of raw computational power, in the ability to multitask, but I would still be nominally Human.

Okay so far?

Now for the book.

I opened it up and it was just like a tablet. Except the cover was reabsorbed back into the thing through some kind of nanomachine work of wonder. It took a moment to work out the mechanism that must have been developed to create such a thing. Boy I'm smart.

No doubt about it, I was holding a real thing from some alternate universe's future library. It even said "Property of Bayville Plutonian Library, City of Catalyst, Mars, 2456." I bet it could look like anything. Some kind of default mode probably.

A few checks didn't reveal any kind of message or whatever. I was able to synch up my brain implant with the device and run some checks, and boy howdy, nothing is better than the internet than an internet without government oversite!

There were all kinds of references to stuff from the future that hadn't happened yet. Plus since this baby was from the future I wouldn't have to wait for all my favorite authors to publish their books now. Bonus!

It even has historical examples of cyber warfare on file.

And I have a brain implant.

You know, I think I'll keep some of those filters on for now.

I got up, stood up, and stretched. Feeling how the new body worked. I was getting a bit hungry and had a case of cotton mouth and other than that everything was pretty good. I was dressed in my good work boots with oil resistance, slick resistance, stain resistance, electrical resistance, water resistance, steel toe super construction boots. Funny, considering I'd thrown those away last week and these looked brand new with about two weeks' worth of "worn in" in them. Cargo jeans and belt, with Harley Davidson wallet with all my credentials and cards and cash, Leatherman tool on the belt with cell phone on the other side. Blue shirt, exercise watch on the right wrist, and my construction helmet – orange.

Why?

Well not having a hat in this desert would be kind of dumb. And it had a built-in sweat band.

I looked to the left and considered my Xeno-Commander. You know, I'd only been playing the games for a few months and this looked like a good time to take a look into the backstory on the things . . . .

. . . . only to find that I had nothing. Every mention of Uber Entertainment had been scrubbed, sanitized like the information from a spy novel. I couldn't look up who came up with the different games or the fan fiction because it wasn't there anymore.

Okay, that was one resource I was counting on I wouldn't have. Fine then. For all I knew Commander Drich was on the other end of this thing. Or maybe someone else had designed it as his new body. Or maybe it was an experimental. Or maybe ROB swiped someone else's stuff. Or any one of a thousand other weird things.

Someone had set this up for me. I'll roll with it.

I give it a command to make it move. It picks up a leg and puts it down —

"BOOM – CRACK!"

I blink and suddenly I'm 200 feet away from the bolder I'm on top of and I need to reboot my brain to figure out what happened.

Let's see, robot makes a step and makes a "Thump!" just like in the game and the huge ass bolder we're perched upon cracks in half and the pieces go flying everywhere and I'm moving so fast that I can't even clock my own reaction time because my new brain can't keep up . . . .

That's ridiculously fast.

I run the math and that's, like, fast enough to write my name on a passing bullet while it travels through the air.

That's very, very fast.

Also the boulder is about the size of Cochegan Rock, the largest free-standing boulder on the eastern seaboard, which is about 54 feet long, 50 feet high, 58 feet wide and weighed 7,000 tons. For all you nature lovers out there.

Having your brain hooked to the internet is awesome!

The Xeno-Commander cracked it in half just by moving and then it had fallen down that crack and pushed the pieces of the boulder aside by its sheer weight and mass. At the same time I'd climbed down a deadly moving landscape at a speed that the fastest moving animals on earth would be jealous of.

Okay, I was ratcheting my upgrades up about five hundred years, giving myself decent combat routines and putting myself somewhere in the Battle Angel Alita Universe in terms of technological superiority. Because that little bit of "Oh, shit no!" just unlocked my super powers.

Which I'd forgotten about.

Because I have memory problems.

Also, watching that boulder break apart was pretty damn cool.

This particular grab bag was called "Micro Materials Manipulation." By use of some kind of extra-sensory abilities I could shrink my world view down to a single cell and track the individual blood cells circulating through my body. Not all at once. It kind of reminded me of one of those shrinking movies where the guys go inside another human's body and explores the place. My favorite is Inner Space with Steven Spielberg. According to my fractured memories I'd spent the better part of a week making some of the nanomachine technology inside my body, moving them around with something like telekinesis, putting them together to make something workable, reverse engineering the technology (?), improving my body and doing a whole bunch of other stuff while making lots of references to the Internet Book.

Everyone who even has an inkling about science fiction has heard of nanomachines. They can be fast, smart, dumb, cool, were all-round scary and were the holy Rosetta stone to some pretty advanced technology. Mine were no different. I now had the ability to Read and Write in the language people call DNA.

My newly built body has special chemical receptors and manipulators in the hands that can isolate and read DNA and RNA very rapidly. The brain now has a special pattern-recognition section devoted to decoding the information received and reconstructing the implications of that coding for the organism from which it comes. Like online genetic modeling. That what's called Reading. It's really no more difficult than the pattern recognition done by our eyes.

The other is more complex. If you know how an organism goes together, you can figure out ways to take it apart and put it back together, give it different abilities, new purposes. The manipulators in my hands can produce DNA, RNA or retroviruses that can alter the genetics of an individual or produce a new organism or nanomachine with the desired characteristics. It's a little harder than Reading and takes more training and concentration, but it works the same way.

The process of Writing out the nanomachines and the retroviruses that modified my genetic code and altered the makeup of my brain, installing receptors, modifiers, never paths, and creating new brain tissues was quite intense and rife with danger. I could understand why I did it. Nanomachine technology works fast. Like, a few dozen generations a second. My power was quite something but now I had some serious tools. Now that my transformation was complete I had a guaranteed method of survival.

The memory loss wasn't that great.

The bones, for instance, had been replaced with a new material that has no name but which I'll just call Bone Armor Mark 01, that was made to correct for several defects. I hadn't found it online but created it myself after coming to several conclusions. The new eyes were all based on information I'd found on the human eye, cybernetics, mantis shrimp, and new super cameras. The rest was a natural outgrowth of "Once you have the technology, you can do this, this and that."

Also includes combat routines hard-wired into my new cyber-brain.

I looked over at the broken rock I'd fallen asleep on and watched as the Xeno-Commander effortlessly shoved aside a slab of rock the size of my house and walked over to me. This time it was generating gravity and inertial fields that lessened impacts and making good use of focused electromagnetic fields to prevent its feet from sticking through the ground and sinking out of site. Any dirt or rock or debris that threatened to mar its perfect features were "eaten" by the body.

The Xeno-Commander was new. It wasn't there when I put myself to sleep when I upgraded my brain.

Let me back up and re-explain some stuff.

One – I'm a Self-Insert.

Two – I have memory problems and I've actually been in this desert for eight days now.

Three – I have a Shard from the WORM Universe that gives me a whole rainbow of extra mental abilities that make me seem like a psychic blacksmith with fine-control microscopic telekinesis with extra sensory perceptions, including but not limited to some decent Thinker and Tinker powers which include tech-trees with chemistry, biology, and machinery that allow me to manipulate the nanoscopic world so long as it exists inside my body or at least an inch away from my skin.

Four – My ROB had gifted me with some nanomachines to start off with from five or six different universes, I think – there were at least twenty different types and not all of them had been created by human beings. All of them were broken, 334 pieces in total, and I didn't have all the parts. So I had to make my own.

This allowed me to turn myself into a high-grade cyborg in a very short time and invent a microscopic wormhole camera system that I then wired into my nervous system.

This seemed to put me on level with the Commanders from the Supreme Commanders games. The Commander was so damn small, but I could operate it by remote control.

Decently experimental.

I was remembering a lot more random shit, mostly about how damn hungry I'd been after a week in the desert without food and water. Only my power had kept me from pissing and shitting and sweating away my body's only resources and dying from exposure on a planet with a 30 hour day.

(8 days times a 30 hour day is 240 hours or 10 days for you math-illiterate types that need a calculator.)

Then there was the sun – oh god the SUN!

For the first time today I consciously noticed RA blazing away in the sky. How hot was it? A quick check with my watch, my new in-built sensors and the Commander, made me want to cry. No, it wasn't a hundred degrees out — it was a muggy, airless one hundred-twenty-seven damned degrees and I could hardly breathe . . . . !

Fixing that right now.

Coping with the temperature was not a complex problem. First, I increased my pigmentation and did damage control on my severely burnt skin; the resulting skin tone rivaled that of the darkest gentleman from Africa and cut down on absorbed radiation. Then I turned my pain receptors back on since I was no longer suffering and looking like an over-exposure victim for the advertisement of Sunblock 9000. Next I transferred all surviving fat deposits – still kind of fat but not as much anymore – to locations deep inside my torso to reduce heat retention. Then I improved my heat-dispensation capacity of my skin and lungs by increasing the blood flow to and through them.

Fifteen minutes later I was finished. The adjustments were quick and by the time I was done the weather – to my perception anyway – had improved remarkably. The pleasant warmth of sunlight offset by a refreshingly cool breeze. I felt like taking on the world.

Unfortunately, it appeared that I might have to. From my second-hand knowledge it appears that I've been dumped onto an alien world of some sort. There was only one plant in the area and it was definitely alien in origin.

I sent the Commander over to take a look, it thumped, thumped, thumped over – honestly, how can it be heavy? A solid block of lead of the same size wasn't that heavy! – proving that I was indeed smarter than the average bear. The tightly wound spiral of red plant fibers not only looked like a band saw that someone had tightened into a clock spring, it had a proximity sensor with a hair trigger that allowed it to uncoil and slash at anything that came near it. The Xeno-Commander was hardly inconvenience and had no trouble at all clipping off a sample and bringing it back to me.

An examination of the thumb-nail sized portion with the nanotech in my fingers revealed that it was very sharp, poisonous, over 5,000 years old, reproduced by setting itself on fire so that hydrogen filled sacs of itself could be burned and cast floating seeds into the wind.

I used the knowledge to give myself some ruby Red claws with poisonous secretions while also making adjustments here and there to the rest of my biology.

I was good to go. But I was also down the road a ways towards starvation. Even minor repairs and alterations involved the accelerated divisioning of millions of cells and each and every one of them were clamoring for nourishment. This could be offset by swallowing a few rock chips and using my nanites and that seems to be mostly what I was doing. Of course I was pretty hungry when this whole thing started so I was pretty glad right now that I'd been such a fat tub of lard.

A situation which wouldn't last long. I wanted a five star meal and I need to get out of here!

Accessing the Xeno-Commander, or maybe I should call it Remote Controlled Alien Command Unit, or ACXCU – no, that's a terrible name – I directed the Xeno-Commander to reclaim the boulder.

The next minute was a lesson in bullshit progenitor technologies as hard light pressor beams sprang from an Einstein-Rosen bridge to the left of its chest and covered the rock with red nanomachines. A tractor beam pulling in the resulting slurry into another wormhole to the right of its chest made the "Mass Storage" tally count go upwards slightly. Soon there was nothing left but sand but I had it keep going anyway.

And going.

And going.

And going.

This made quite a hole.

So now we had enough materials to make a mass extractor, power generator, energy storage unit and metal storage unit. Ten minutes for each. Then a Tier 1 Air Factory to fill the hole . . . and wow is that impressive up close and personal. I mean I'm talking about stuff that's the size of an entire house here and it just goes up and up and up!

Colors are mainly poisonous orange with highlights of blood red, by the way.

The first fabricator aircraft comes off the factory . . . and wait a minute!

The fuck?

Okay, we have a problem!

The fabricator aircraft is about the size of a model aircraft. Like the kind you put together with a few thousand bucks, fueled with special gas, then launch off a pad the size of your driveway and fly in the air on remote control. Its ten feet wide. It's hobby sized.

Of course the Air Factory is only about the size of a one story house and the platform is about six feet above my head.

This requires further investigation!

I put the Xeno-Commander on "Autonomous Mode," and told it to build one of each type of factory and make the best of it and watch what happens.

It went to town like a sub-commander.

An hour later I had the Vehicle Factory, Bot Factory, and Orbital Launcher all in a row. They were each spitting out fabrication units and nothing else. I'm clicking on the other units I see in my heads up display I had access to when I was using the Xeno-Commander, which is the same as what you see on the computer for the most part, and nothing is happening.

Why?

I was getting error messages.

Another hour messing around and I finally, reluctantly, with tears, came to the conclusion that this Xeno-Commander was incomplete. I had economy and advanced economy units, I had factories, even orbital factories, all the fabrication units, advanced factories and advanced fabrication units. Nothing else. I had a fat database filled with scientific knowledge and data but no working designs.

I was missing all my Units!

I had nothing I could use as a workhorse or to crush my enemies under a wave of steel and progenitor alloys. My orbital launcher was a bit of an enigma. It was a big part of my economy, which was what this loadout was all about apparently. So I had my orbital fabrication bots to send up into the sky to build orbital factories and I also had the Astraeus unit to move my fabricator units from planet to planet. Once the orbital factory is up and running I also had access to the solar array for power to boost my economy and make more orbital fabricators and those fabricators could build stuff on a planet's surface or make a jig on a gas giant no problem. No orbital avenger or anchor, no death from above laser platform.

Good thing someone already rewired my brain for improved effectiveness otherwise I wouldn't have remembered the names for all this awesome shit.

I did have the halley for some reason, but I guess the ability to move asteroids and planets around to optimize resources counts somehow.

No defensive buildings, basic or advanced or otherwise. No orbital and deep space radar, radar or walls. No laser defense towers, galata turret, pelters, torpedo launcher, umbrellas, or anything like their more advanced versions. I did have teleporters for some reason but I was assuming that was a part of my transportation and needs to move my units around. I also had the catalyst, but without one of those death star planets it wasn't very useful to me right now except for reverse engineering.

I was missing all my weapons!

WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!

THIS WILL NOT STAND!

I'm a Space Battler. And if there was a way to turn something as mundane as illegal porn into a weapon, I can fuck it up and make it infinitely more effective!

So!

I handed the Internet Book to the Xeno Commander and told it to learn all that was learnable.

Something like a cable excreted itself from one of its arms and touched the book and it absorbed the whole unit into its body.

Took one second.

Then suddenly it had another tech base and a whole smorgasbord of optional weapons designs to work with including all the experimental models from Lockheed and Martin and ass loads of data. A little back and forth between us playing twenty questions and I got it started on Project Bootstrap to start reverse engineering its own technologies. We were starting off with plain old earth tech and whatever nano technological wonders I could bring to the table. But it's a start!

Actually things might not be that bad. I didn't have CADS (Computer Assisted Designs) of any alien technology beyond the economy and transport units I needed to get my stuff moved around the solar system from Planetary Assault. But! I had a huge alien database filled with information and scientific knowledge. If I was right, and I'm pretty sure that I am, I would eventually be able to recreate all the technological goodies of not just Planetary Assault, but Supreme Commander as well.

After all, if a man knows that a tank is perfectly possible and he goes to a world that hasn't invented them yet, is given a garage, fifty guys to boss around, and a year he could come up with a tank. From that moment on its just a long road of redesigning and testing and upgrades. Simplified of course, but you get the idea.

Now, aircraft for the Air Factory.

I had lots of those from earth. Between hobbyists and the military and toys there were over a hundred thousand different kinds of aerial recon craft, unmanned or otherwise to play around with. There were two types, the ones that required a runway and the ones that used lots of thrust to lift itself off the ground, VTOL. Size varied. I had the Air Factory queued up to make a hundred of each kind, alternating, and to make two or three all at the same time on the platform if there was room enough available.

Some of them would need a runway, so I had the Air Factory produce the vertical takeoff and landing kind first while the fabrication aircraft formed a runway coming away from the Air Factory. Only when it was done then did it start making runway aircraft.

I needed a base. Okay, no problem. A few science fiction books to look up and I had the ideas I needed (Thank you James P. Hogan.) I gave the commander my ideas and it started to run simulations. Designing things clearly wasn't it's forte. But it could game the system better than I, and that was what was important.

Ground penetrating radar from the commander located three metal deposits next to an underground river. It was close by and I was thirsty and I decided not to wait around any longer. Away went fabricator vehicles, bots and aircraft. The things only had one speed, Go. I hitched a ride on one of the vehicle fabricators and held on for dear life as it went zooming over the landscape, arriving last as I made it give me as smooth a ride as possible.

Oh god! My ass . . .

PORT LANDING 001 was to be a sprawling complex. Mainly derived from purely human technology, the complex grew in stages as breakthroughs occurred and upgrades were applied and new inventions came about, all in a matter of three hours.

Despite near-constant re-design the result was a clean, efficient, functional layout, suitably modified where appropriate to take account of local conditions. Besides its industrial facilities, the complex included an air and space terminal distributed mainly across several nearby mountains which had their tops cut and leveled, which were interconnected by a network of tunnels that hollowed out those same mountains giving us plenty of mass and metal to work with.

Mostly an experiment, the capacity of the complex itself took account of long-range-demand forecasts and more than satisfied the current requirements of the primitive industries that were to be scattered around the general area. Its primary power source was a 50 thousand gigawatt, magnetically confined fusion system which combined various features and a smattering of alien tech, producing electricity very efficiently by blasting high-velocity, high-temperature, ionized plasma through a series of immense magnetohydrodynamic coils. In addition, the fast neutrons produced in copious amounts from this process were harnessed to breed more tritium fuel from lithium, to breed fissionable isotopes of uranium and plutonium from fertile elements obtained elsewhere in the same complex, and to "burn up" via nuclear transmutation the small amounts of radioactive wastes left over from the economy's fission component, the fuel cycle of which was fully closed and included complete reprocessing and recycling of reactor products.

The plasma emerged from this primary process with sufficient residual energy to provide high-quality heat for supplying a hydrogen-extraction plant, where water from underground was "cracked" thermally to yield bases for a whole range of liquid synthetic fuels, a primary-metals extraction and processing sub-complex, a chemical-manufacturing sub-complex, and a desalination plant which was not operational yet, but anticipated large-scale irrigation/factory farming projects several miles away so that I could someday get something to eat!

The metals-extraction sub-complex made use of the high fusion temperatures available on-site to reduce water, common rocks, all this damnable sand, and all forms of waste and debris to a plasma of highly charged elementary ions which were then separated cleanly and simply by magnetic techniques; it was like an industrial scale mass spectrometer. In the chemicals sub-complex a range of compounds such as fertilizers, plastics, oils, fuels, and feedstocks for an assortment of dependent industries were also formed primarily by recombining reactants from the plasma state under conditions in which the plasma radiation was tuned to peak in a narrow frequency band that favored the formation of desired molecules and optimized yields without an excess of unwanted by-products. The plasma method did away with most of the vats and distilling towers of older earth-based technologies and, moreover, enabled bulk reactions to proceed in seconds — without requiring catalysts to accelerate them.

Also built a Repair and Maintenance facility with hangers for servicing the machines during downtime and to apply the upgrades I'd be rolling out soonest.

Project Port Landing was mostly pure research; experiments were underway to begin the long process of cracking open the Power Generators tech trees and figuring out the methods by which power could be beamed through the air without the use of power lines to satellites, to be relayed around the planet and redirected to the surface wherever needed so I had something other than the normal plug-and-play options. Although very primitive compared to Tier 1 Power Generators I now had a means by which to upgrade to a fully functional Hydrocarbon Power Plant and a Mass Fabricator with which to convert energy into mass and metals.

Then I went inside my newly created concrete home next to my new spaceport to get out of the sun and into the shade. Also got rid of the hardhat I was wearing.

Building things was strange. I'd just picked the first large-scale airport I could find in the database and told the Xeno-Commander to modify it to suit our needs. In autonomous mode it was always one hundred percent perfect and efficient with its economy and the building of its forces. But it kept asking for permissions. It kept finding these little things to update the earth's technologies with information from the alien database. We hadn't even gotten started with applying alien technologies wholesale yet!

Well we were, but it was mostly in simulation. Confusing, I know. The computer running the commander was so much smarter than anything I'd ever worked with. But it was also kind of dumb.

Beyond a doubt, I was working with a very intelligent, competent, well programed servant-type AI.

But it wasn't creative.

It's kind of hard to describe but easy to understand.

If you give a group of people a project you'll get back what you asked for but you'll also find that they had developed solutions to problems you never considered and what they might come up with is something very different than what you had in mind and might be a whole lot better. It's the kind of creative feedback that can drive an engineer's manager up the wall.

Give the same project to the Xeno-Commander and it'll come back with something almost exactly like what you had in mind in the first place and nothing else. It was almost like magic, seeing your own thoughts so rationally developed to its most logical conclusions. But there are also none of those insights that people put into their work.

After I soon realized what was happening I spent most of my time checking on the work at the Port and finding small creative things that would improve the final product.

Thank you Worm Shard for making me an instant super-engineer!

But this was hardly efficient.

My first true effort at programming the alien machine was to get it to check its database for alternative or superior components and include them automatically. I called this the Automatic Upgrade Button. It was intended to be as simple to apply as it was when your computer needed an update. It was my job to come up with creative solutions to our problems or to create concepts. To this end everything I thought up was designed with simplicity and efficiency in mind, which was appropriate for use in disposable products for testing. Then the Xeno-Commander would take my ideas and hand them over to our immature group of Research and Development supercomputers for simulation, manufacturing and endless testing.

R&D was a new add-on. Each factory now had its own supercomputer to run simulations of its products and was allowed to create one new experimental unit to test to destruction after producing 12 regular units. Should any of the newer Experimental Units exceed parameters by 5% this was considered a success and the results loaded to the AI Engineering Upgrade Forum for use and abuse. The Xeno-Commander would give it a review and then give me options of where to go from there.

Options, they're everything.

Once a product was functional and given the "Okay" stamp of approval a new product would be produced that was non-expendable, hardened to survive the apocalypse and everything rebuilt for greater safety and efficiency and more potency. There were a lot of engineering firms that had a lot of programs for computers and procedures for doing this sort of thing and my new R&D was to use these whenever possible, or come up with new ones when they didn't fit. Safety was still important since I was still squishy, we also had to start including anti-terrorist, anti-sabotage, anti-cyber warfare, stealth and anti-stealth systems and ways to keep people from reverse engineering my technology into everything. There are many other techniques to be found in the textbooks.

I then ordered the Xeno-Commander to create a series of new AI programs along with the super-computers to house them in, created using both software from my human meat brain and from its own operating program. Based off some of the smartest characters in comics they were also color coordinated; Project Sci-Fi Think Tank was a go!

The first was Reed Richards, aka "Mr. Fantastic" – code named Blue. Respectively the smartest man in the world and master of all fields of science, particularly cosmic radiation and antimatter physics. Into this program was uploaded all our available knowledge of Engineering (Mechanical, Aerospace, and Electrical), Chemistry, Mathematics, Physics and Biology (Human & Alien). It is to this AI which I have given the job of advancing our knowledge of various fields such as space/time/extra-dimensional travel, biochemistry, robotics, computers, synthetic polymers, communications, mutations, transportation, holography, spectral analysis and so much more. If I wanted to brush up on my knowledge of other dimensions and the methods which to travel to and through then it was Computer Blue I was going to depend on.

Computer Blue's personal project, Theoretical Research and Applications Development.

Opposing Blue was Computer Green – Dr. Doom or "Victor Von Doom." The evil intellectual counterpart of Blue in regards to all fields of science with a special expertise in the fields of Energy Absorption/Manipulation, Robotics, Cybernetics, Genetics, Weapons Technology, Biochemistry and possible applications of Time Travel and, it is also to this computer which I will depend upon for the reverse engineering and possible development of any science fictional technologies I managed to get my hands on. Magic too.

Computer Green was in charge of Project Military Might.

Tony Stark aka "Iron Man" – code named Red. The master innovator of all my tech with an emphasis on being able to predict future problems and develop solutions before they even present themselves. General knowledge of technology as a jack-of-all-trades type with a bend towards Physics, Mechanical Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Chemistry, Nanomachine Technology and Computer Sciences. The Red Computer is the engineer and mechanic that can turn Computer Blue's ideas into reality.

Project 2000 Suits of Armor was given directional oversite to Computer Red, with a side project for developing the robots I needed for the Bots Factory.

To round out this sausage-fest is "The Engineer" aka Angela Spica, a member of Stormwatch in the Wildstorm Universe – code named Silver. Obsessed with Computer Science in all forms and equipped with all of our knowledge of Nanomachine Technologies it was to Computer Silver whom I would go to first to deal with problems and to help me develop microscopic machinery so that I might someday create Ad-hoc Weapons whole-cloth in combat, create Energy Force Fields and Electrical Storms, Control Devices like radio-operated drones, Rocket Engines, create Clones, spread Viruses (both biological and technological) to infect both machines and living creatures, grow new organs such as replacement lungs to cope with unfamiliar atmospheres, Cybernetics and many other feats which are to be bound only by my imagination and ingenuity.

Computer Silver's assignment was called Project Wunderkind.

Last but not least was the Bat Computer which ran off a computer model of Barbara Gordon aka Oracle – code named Black. Into this machine was programed everything there was to know about batman and his various sidekicks with the mind of Police Commissioner Gordon's daughter. Paranoia runs high with this one, this was the only good guy character I knew of off the top of my head without doing research who successfully hacked into Batman's communications devices. Computer Black's focus was on Technical Ingenuity, Cyber Warfare and was "Go-Go-Gadget Happy!" More of an engineer than a scientist, less an inventor and more of an innovator. With our human and alien database and alien technologies it was fairly easy for Computer Black to start cranking out newer versions of the bat belts, bat cars, bat copters, bat tanks, bat-this-n-that and all kinds of other things from the comic books.

Computer Black is in charge of Project Gismo-Tech.

Since they were feminine computers, I'd hoped they'd "get" the concept of babies and guarding the future of mankind, but mostly me.

All of these new super computers had only one job, to think and try to be creative and be the brains behind my R&D Initiative. From starting out with purely earth technology and a mixture of reverse engineered Alienware I think I did pretty good. They all had random number generators built into their computers and by taking in background cosmic radiation to tickle their programming they were capable of inducing "wild thoughts." All of them were fully capable machines and they took advantages of Earth's science fiction and most advanced scientific knowledge to self-program themselves so that they could find problems and work out their own solutions – at least three – to a problem before comparing results.

After seeing them design a drinks dispenser machine I decided to build two more super computers. One was Yellow and called "Jack-be-Quick" since it couldn't seem to focus on any problem for more than thirty seconds before moving onto something else. The other was Orange and called "Old Joe" since he was built around the concept of slow and steady wins the race, and would spend an entire day on a single problem, engineering and reengineering a thing out of all proportions to needs or reality.

Lastly I created an oversight program called MOM, which is short for Mission Operations Manager (I like Martian Mystery, sue me). Into her program I put all my feminine ideas and desires into and it was her job to make sure we didn't go too crazy and to clean up after ourselves, do the accounting and make sure all our chores were done in a timely fashion. She was in charge of the Lists. Whenever I thought of something I wanted to do she would put it on "The List" and schedule it into our now very busy day. It didn't have a dedicated system to run on but moved from system to system as it checks up on everyone.

Both the Red and Green Computers focused on manufacturing advanced military machines that were already available on Earth. Which was the best of 2016 is somewhat up for debate. The analysis we used is based on the on the combined score of stealthiness, armament, speed, range, maneuverability and technology. Pilot opinion was also considered during training. Analysis was based on specifications, available data and technical comparison.

Computer Red came up with the Super-Simulator and figured out how to program it. This works by putting various machines in the simulator that was accurate right down to the sub-microscopic level, simulating the Earth's solar system using Google earth and other information to reproduce various environments and time periods, and then by having the machines game themselves in total warfare for the worst possible future for an extended period of time while using information obtained to alter the designs slightly through a series of never-ending upgrades, with reviews about a hundred simulated years apart.

The result was the glorious, the stupendous, the insane, Diamond Leviathan.

Made out of this common and yet very useful material, the Diamond Leviathan could take on any five aircraft in the world including many fictional ones with every advantage given to the enemy and come out on top without breaking a sweat. Their closest reference in fiction are the Velocipods from The Incredibles Pixar movie. Someone actually managed to make a drone of the thing. Anyway, this bad boy had big fat silver tear-drop-shaped body with the wings, thrusters, and honest to god tentacles attached by a – I think I'll call it the Body Orbits system since it doesn't have a name – system which allows these peripherals to move all around the body in defiance of all normal concepts of construction while the body stayed straight and level with the ground. From the arms of the wings come thousands of tentacles which hold these flat panels about the size of a man's hand but with some very interesting characteristics. These wings and feather can then rearrange themselves while in flight to give the craft any kind of flying characteristic you could name and quite a number of impossible ones. It could perfectly mimic any aircraft in the world. It could put itself into a flat spin, fly backwards and sideways and any other ways you could think of!

The material it was made of was so mind-numbingly heat resistant that it could fly into the atmosphere at any insane angle you could calculate and come out just fine on the other side. It was similar to the Progenitor materials that allowed Commanders to walk through lava, yet it was also very light. This also made it damn near laser proof to all but the most bad-ass science-fiction energy weapons.

For armament the craft had a built-in fabricator to give it whatever it wanted. Mostly variations on missiles and bullets. It uses both magnetic forces and gravity to accelerate the payloads through a barrel with teleporters on each end causing it to accelerate indefinitely in a loop, making the barrel go from four feet long to one that is actually many miles in length and allowing its payload to be moved up to nearly any speed before deployment – depending on charging time of course. Then entire surface of the body is covered in panels which cover a deployment system for 212 teleporters which are then used to shoot missiles and bullets in any direction.

REMEMBER: WATT IS THE UNIT OF POWER

Instead of lasers we used the previous doctrine to outfit each aircraft with its own particle accelerator beam weapon, somewhat based off the anti ballistic missile defense system for the United States and its Strategic Defense Initiative, but mostly from the more powerful synchrotrons and cyclotrons used in nuclear research. Commonly referred in science fiction by a myriad names, phasers, particle accelerator guns, ion cannons, lightning rays, rayguns etc., this baby proved to be much powerful in the "Ha-Ha-Ha!" laugh-o-meter range. Ten petawatts of energy, and we could sustain it thanks to over-powered progenitor energy plant technologies. The trick was to use the teleporters to shorten a 300 foot long machine into a 3 foot long machine while actually achieving a result similar to a 3000 foot long machine, AND using gravity and magnetic forces to manipulate the energy in ways that no physical lens could duplicate to bounce the energy around and focus it into something we could use. Special tentacles with teleporter guns on the end of them are then used to orientate the beams in any direction. Since it was laser proof it could also shoot itself.

It has long been theorized that a pulsed particle beam emitted by such a weapon may contain 1 gigajoule of kinetic energy or more. The speed of a beam approaching that of light (299,792,458 m/s in a vacuum) in combination with the energy created by the weapon would negate any realistic means of defending a target against the beam. Target hardening through shielding or materials selection would be impractical or ineffective, especially if the beam could be maintained at full power and precisely focused on the target like I can.

Well, progenitor technologies are actually that awesome when it comes to armor. Hopefully whatever enemies I come round to fighting aren't that fortunate. Not bad for a kludge.

The guns, missiles and lasers were dialable systems. The lasers could be used as spotlights. The guns could shoot anything including pencils thanks to generous applications of gravitational forces. The missiles could shoot fireworks too. All three weapons represented the tried and true method of rock, paper, scissors where if one don't work, use the other. If you needed a fourth thing you can cobble the other three together to make something new. Like a rock covered in flaming paper with the blades of scissors sticking out of it, flying.

Just for shits and giggles I relaxed the control I had over my body and allowed myself to go to the bathroom so that one of the fabricators could scan the result and be able to replicate it on command. So now I had bullshit missiles to go with my bullshit technologies.

Frap boys need to up their games.

After the Leviathan the bomber was actually easier to design. It didn't need to do maneuvers or work in contested areas. It just needed to dominate the area like a flying fortress-type of mountain. In appearance it looked like a bell and used various gravitational forces to keep it aloft. So armor was a thing. Most of the ship is armor so it could survive at least three hits from weapon systems comparable to the Leviathan before a breech. It has three onboard factories dedicated to producing bombs and teleporter units with the last one going to repairs and modifications.

Force fields were something of an iffy concept at the moment since it was only in the last hour that the Xeno-Commander and the Think Tank Color Computers had managed to reverse engineer enough Progenitor tech and database to make that possible but we used them where we could. They were used in some manufacturing processes so we had that to work with. Coverage on the machine was sporadic. The only reason that aircraft don't have them is that the force field would prevent them from having a lifting body and any exhaust or energy put out by the engines and weapons would be trapped inside with the machine. They weren't permeable like in Star Trek. They were just walls. Someday we'll have that ability but not now. Not yet.

The teleporter units can move much faster and were more maneuverable than the Bell-Bomber but not faster than common military aircraft of 2016. (Remember all of these things are mostly experimental, speed upgrades will come later as I figure out what the fuck I'm doing.) They look like big rings that use force fields to both protect the ring and to create a lifting body along the outside edge so it works like a giant spinning fan with a hollow center. Once in position the Rings becomes a relay for the bomber to teleport all the ordinance it has so far manufactured and dump them over the target. Missiles and lasers and more Diamond Leviathans and troops and whatever could be transported through these flying disks as well; plus anything attempting to fly through the Rings when the teleporter is offline will be crushed into a singularity thanks to the gravitational lens it uses to move around.

For offense the Bell-Bomber uses our newly developed ray gun scaled up 1000X times to be a more powerful. The shots fired are then focused through the Rings it arrays around itself to bend and focus the beam onto targets.

A happy development is that a number of these rings can be moved around and used by other flying machines to accelerate them in a given direction for that added boost when we needed to deliver the mail – when you positively, absolutely, gotta have it there yesterday, YAY!

So long as I had enough of them the rings could form a highway with the rings on the bottom used to pick up anything (rocks, people, buildings, vehicles, water from the ocean, sand) and accelerate it one after another, ring by ring, until it got to orbit at speed.

Double YAY!

When it came to aerial reconnaissance drones we had something of a tie. Red and Green got into a snit fit over whose designs were better. Whereas Red's version of a Firefly looked period, Green had the drone copter which had a stable platform but less speed and looked like something from the terminator. The simulations pulled up lots of pros and cons for the both of them. Both could be equipped with weapons or other tools. Both could be used in space once the engines were replaced with antigravity drives. Both could be adapted to be used on mostly any planet except for the heaviest worlds.

Fact is that thanks to the teleporters just about anything could be made to fly if you could feed it enough power. Bricks included. So I pulled them back from all of that, drew a ball, put in an antigravity device that works well enough to keep it off the ground, then covered the exterior with Hailey rockets fed by Teleporters that are in turn fed by the Hydrocarbon plant I had the Xeno-Commander build.

That was "Speed – is-more-important-and-I-don't-give-a-fuck – Mode," by the way, I ain't that stupid. We could also use pressurized air, water, or napalm to squirt it around. Any kind of liquid or gas would do for propellant. It could also be used to distribute poison.

All should fear my flaming metal balls!

In "Stealth Mode" the teleporters created a hard vacuum by removing the air in the direction in which it was to travel. Since the total active area was about the size of the beach ball's surface area, this was plenty of power to pull my machine around at four gravities. Wouldn't work in space, but that's what the Hailey's are for.

First fire, now suck: the sexual innuendos just write themselves don't they?

I couldn't take full credit. The Air Ball was an ingenious invention of the author Philip Francis Nowlan, who wrote the story "BUCK ROGERS IN THE 25TH CENTURY (Armageddon 2419 Ad; The Airlords Of Han) & THE PRINCE OF MARS RETURNS."

My "Flying Metal Balls Scouts of DOOM!" were each a sphere of metal three feet wide equipped with a primary lens four inches in diameter that could see anything, a nice self-destruct mechanism and had its own Tier 1 micro-factory, just like the aircraft, so could manufacture and deploy any kind of sensor you could imagine.

They looked like giant, peeping, flying, stealthy eyeballs.

Again, insert lots of sexual references here! Thank you!

Naturally, after realizing what I'd just created, I had the Xeno-Commander issue such orders that all of our aircraft and machines were to be upgraded so that teleporters could be used to remove the air in front of it so they could move that much faster.

So that was the Units for the Air Factory.

The Vehicle Factory was even simpler.

A thing I didn't say in detail before was size. Tier 1 factories only built things that were "toy size." The aircraft were the size of model airplanes and toy-sized aircraft. The biggest of which could be folded up and put into a space in your garage next to your car. Tier 2 factories could build complete tractor trailer trucks with cargo five at a time and ready to roll off the floor as soon as the last component had been put into place – or just about anything that could fit down the highway. Type 3 factories could build everything including the largest mobile construction machines on earth in the Guinness Book of World Records. The fabricator units were also scaled up the same way.

My Tier 1 tank was about the size of a pair of vending machines tipped on its side. Where before we once had a decent killing machine I'll now introduce you to Tiny Tank, a small yellow tank with an occasionally unfriendly attitude. The creation of this cute killing machine made me all kinds of warm and fuzzy. Its primary method of travel was to cover the ground with a sludge of nanomachines that it then sucked up as it passed by, refilling its hoppers with the materials it needed to make more nanomachines. This method allowed it to do anything with the ground it passed over. From laying mines to building traps or even roads.

It's body only had a passing resemblance to the character in the game. It had no head. Rail guns and x-ray lasers being what they are, to be seen is to die. The front is equipped with a specialized tunneling machine that turned everything in front of it into sand and was so quiet that all you could hear is the sand shifting around behind it as it proceeded into the earth at about the speed of a man who runs. A portion of this sand would be absorbed and turned into mass for storage with another potion converted into metal for metal storage. Weapons loadout started with an 80 mm railgun, plus whatever weapons that could be attached to the body in a modular fashion, which included everything.

So we had atomic weapons, lasers, railguns and magnetic launchers and every kind of energy weapon known to man and even explosives with odd special effects. There were land mines, artillery shells, and hand grenades too. Robotic arms could be attached where needed and there were even options to use the tanks as farming machinery.

My Tier 1 machines were small enough to enter most buildings for urban combat. Since they could be equipped with appendages I thought it would be good to arm them so I had some swords, staff weapons, and appropriately sized throwing stars built. For close-in work, you understand.

The largest tank ever produced by man weighed in at 69 tons, called the French Char, developed during WWI, used between 1921 and 1940. Only 10 were built. These days, of course, most of our dump trucks were bigger than that. So our medium grade tank was scaled up appropriately starting, again, with Earth's already plentiful weapons of war and applying upgrades. For instance; something as simple as replacing the armor and metals of the M1A2 SEP, successor to the M1A2 Abrams, cut the amount of maintenance needed on such vehicles down to almost nothing and would allow them to move and maneuver in ways that cannot be accomplished by their earthly counterparts because it would tear their bodies apart. Scaling the machines up was fully possible.

Those were two different machines for my Tier 2 Vehicle Factory by the way.

The next level up, produced by the Tier 3 Vehicle Factories, was fully deserving of the name BOLO. This baby mounted its own copy of the Schwere Gustav, biggest gun ever made, capable of firing 15 foot long shells, with six rail guns, four flame throwers, and built-in missile system that, just like the Diamond Leviathan, could be delivered using the teleporters built into its hull. The machine had a hopper where it could produce "Tiny" tiny tanks that it could custom design and send out as scouts to perform various tasks and as suicide bombers.

A decent tank that.

To control these tanks and give them direction we produced the CCV, or Command and Control Vehicle. It looked like a fat cylinder with wheels, had all the same capabilities of a tank but with half the weapons loadout and ten times the brains of any machine so far deployed. It was equipped with a communications vehicle, or CV, to go with it wherever it went.

Strap on some halley rockets fed with an unlimited supply of hydrogen through the teleporter system and a tank could fly as good as most 2016 Earth type aircraft and head for outer space on continuous thrust. Between that and the various attachments there was no real need to build other types of vehicles. We had the deigns but not the need.

Bots.

Even after some serious think-time in simulation we hadn't really created anything all that impressive or very large. The ASIMOV robot was a six foot tall humanoid with a greater range of motion and only 2.5 times the strength of a human being. The Johnny 5 type robot and its variations were actually more commonly used since its wheelbase gave it fewer points of failure, better stability and made it easier to drive around.

As construction continued round the clock drones that looked less and less human became more commonplace, a whole zoo in fact to cover lots of different specialized functions.

There was the robo-insect – a cylinder about six inches across and two feet long with two helicopter blades on each end. The main body had a number of jointed arms, probes, and a cluster of lenses that gave it that distinct insectile appearance. Hanging from the cylinder like a stinger was a universal toolbox containing a number of tightly packed gadgetry and tools and sensors ready to be deployed for any conceivable task.

Another drone, looking like a flying toaster with over a dozen slots arrayed on its "front," had dozens of sockets on the ends of recessed cables, was always ready to hook itself up to any machine for analysis.

Another drone, built similar to the air ball scout but smaller so it could get into tiny spaces, bristled with lenses of all types. It used gravity to move around and did not any other means.

Then there was the much improved USAF Beetle, an 80 ton tracked vehicle, shielded to deal with nuclear power. Fix an atomic rocket engine? Clean up spills of radioactivity? Rescue H-bomb victims? Tear off the doors to a burning wreck? That's what the Beetle is for. Biggest robot ever made and it was built back in the 1960s. The article I read about it impressed me so much that we had to make a modern version to handle our problems. This one of course didn't have anyone in it but other than the CCV and the Tier 3 BOLO it had the biggest computer of all our mobile forces. Because it could extend itself to five times its own height it also made it perfect for servicing any Transport Aircraft I want to produce, as well as doing maintenance on Tier 2 machines on up. We added two additional arms to the body so it could squirt out red nanomachine, reclaim matter, and fix just about anything as a support unit.

More and more, the vast majority of the machines coming off the assembly lines looked like some variation of Mobot. Not robot. The word was also coined back in the 1960s. These are teleoperated mobile robots, the descendants of which you've probably seen being operated by police men to disable bombs.

The majority of these machines had a small boxy trapezoid-like body like an upright suitcase that ran around on tracks, had at least 4 and sometimes twenty different arms, sometimes with cameras on the ends of arms, with hands that could be interchanged for tools.

Each bot had a micro-teleporter in it for fuel and power since their onboard batteries only had ten minutes of life in them – which I was beginning to think didn't operate the same way it did in the games but had no data available to figure out if this was true, which was really important since there was supposed to have been a war with extra-dimensional Xenos. They had no weapons of their own but since most were only seven feet tall at most and a lot of them had humanoid hands to use they could be geared up like any human and be used to drive and operate all our equipment and tools. Outfitting them was an ongoing project.

That was it.

I didn't feel the need to go all crazy at the moment building machinery I might need to scrap or redesign tomorrow. If it works and is not clearly broken, don't fix it.

We had plenty to do anyway. Scouts were gradually expanding all over the world looking at every little thing. A satellite design was in the works pending reviews so I'll finally have something I can produce when I hit the ARCDY button. Various fabricators were hard at work laying down mass extractors, metal extractors, building energy plants, energy storage, metal storage, mass storage and everything else needed for my economic needs. Soon I'll have radar, deep space radar, Tier 2 and 3 radars going up all over the place. The other technologies would come in time as they came off the drawing board to fill all the niches I was missing.

Until then I had an engineering project I wanted to do. It had been done in fictions and some people had even made proposals about such a system but it hadn't exactly been popular for some reason, even though I thought it was cool as fuck. Since I had the burrowing tank that I could use to snark (to snipe) at people anyway I thought I'd give it a shot.

I needed a way to get my things moved around the planet in a hurry, so I ordered the Xeno Commander to create what amounts to a giant subways system deep underground, planet-wide.

Thanks to my Tier 3 Factories and fabricator units I could build the biggest of the biggest machines produced on earth in 2016. Including the Bagger 293, the largest bucket wheel excavator produced at the time. It is 314.9 feet tall, 738.2 feet long, weighs 14,200 tons and is awesome. The wheel itself is over 70 feet in diameter with 18 buckets, each of which can hold over 15 cubic meters of material. If I wanted to have giant robots in the future and a way to move them around without some enemy seeing what I was doing, rather like in a few Japanese anime films, these were the dimensions I was going to build to.

I also took a moment to redesign the bucket wheel excavator so that it had four Tier 3 power generators and to give it a the biggest engineering unit, ever, and then let the Think Tank over-engineer the rest using Progenitor technologies that had so far been reverse engineered. This also turned the Bagger into a support unit for my T3 Bolos, just like the Beetle.

Twelve layers of tunnels, each 800 feet in diameter and lined with Progenitor armor for safety, with the ones dedicated exclusively for military transport starting about a mile down in the Earth/insert-planet's-name-here crust. They all have super-duper progenitor magnets in the roadbed to magnetically float the cars, trucks, and move the other vehicles I intended to build someday if they were ever needed. The top two layers exist only in the built-up areas to service my economy or where future facilities are planned.

The first is typically two hundred feet down and has a north or south road every other mile. The next is five hundred feet deeper, and has east and west roads, again every other mile. These two are connected at every intersection by saddle-shaped circular roads.

Stations and loading docks will be later built and incorporated into this grid as needed. The design speed for these upper layers of local roads is a hundred miles per hour. And yes, I had cars made to transport the Bagger 293 at that speed to all over the world. If I ever built me a Big O or an Evangelion type of robot I'll be able to get it where it's most needed quite easily.

The rest of the system covers the entire planet, and will soon be on every island more than five miles long.

Other than the top three, which are separated by a spacing of about half a mile in some places due to some geological problems, all the tunnels are evacuated of all air, and were designed to move machinery around at 300 miles an hour or more. Of course, each grid ties in with the grid above it. Where the roads cross tectonic plate boundaries, there are special flexible sections to bridge the gaps. All told, the system permits very rapid transportation from any point on the planet to any other point.

In addition to this is a communications system and superconducting power network. A factory that does nothing but produce nanites all day long provides thousands of gallons of microscopic workers which then digs its own tunnel system into the ground and is used to transport nanites throughout the planet, which in turn builds more nanomachine factories and power generators underground as the web expands throughout the world. They would also be responsible for tunnel maintenance and the construction of a planet-wide water and sewage system.

All of it is underground, as are a number of automatic factories that are to be installed in the future, mostly for whenever in the far future I could think up some reason to use them. Then it would be just a matter of scheduling the build time to build the factories to build the things that I'd need.

Surplus production never hurt anyone.

All in all it is the greatest engineering feat of my lifetime ever attempted. Once the Color Computers have finished simulating it and designing it, in about three days or so, construction can begin. It should be done in two months or so.

Now where is everybody?

I'm getting zip from radar and deep space radar.

Computer Blue is doing the interstellar cartography thing. Computer Green is designing some military equipment I can put up in space and is setting up my basic defense buildings and advanced defense buildings. Computer Red is still focusing on robots and powered armor and better toys for the house. Computer Silver has made some progress in nanomachine human enhancements and better software for my human/machine interface. Computer Black has made a Cleopatra 2525-type grappling tentacle-hook thingy. Nobody's seen anything that looked like a civilization or a bunch of ruins or anything other than the 189,751 different types of lifeforms on this ball.

Which is actually kind of low by the way. Most of them were microscopic in size.

Well I'd only explored an area about the size of Texas, no stone unturned and all of that.

What had we found so far?

Let's seeeeeeee…

The world rotated that way, so that meant that I was at the north pole. Well, close to the arctic circle anyway. My own continent the equivalent of Antarctica. Call the area where I woke up at Greenwich mean time. That means I've been awake and walking around for almost 5 earth hours.

As the Ball Scouts moved further south they started finding indications that this planet wasn't always like this. A bit of archeology and it was revealed that at some point in the past this solar system had two stars. Presumably with the one was very much smaller than the other. Or it might have been a large gas giant with delusions of grandeur. Anyway, something went wrong and it blew up. The telescopes that were constructed could see the scars on the other planets and with a lot of work and math you could figure out where they where and when it happened. So it went nova and destroyed just about all life on this planet. You could still see the debris the star/planet had pushed out in a sphere around it 3 million years later and here we are.

But there was plenty of life to be found. Evolution had found a way. I was finding a lot of caves where life had continued to flourish during the storm. Too many caves in fact. Big and deep, with water being pumped into them from deep underground. Where they artificial?

So now we were starting to see some ruins. Mostly ancient sewage and water systems that had survived deep underground to breed and shelter microscopic life forms until the damage from the star had passed to terraform the atmosphere all over again.

Computer Green finished the ARKYD and launched it.

Place looked like mars after a horrible terraforming accident. Not much water on this planet anymore. You could see where the oceans once were. Lots of ruins. The nova must have pushed most of the atmosphere into space before it was either reclaimed or regenerated. Everything is well preserved. There were also a lot of military structures that seems to have survived as well somehow. Pretty good building techniques. I don't know how they made that purple concrete but that's is one technology that I want for my own. Three million years is nothing to sniff at. Even Progenitor technologies weren't up for that kind of task without any nanites to repair everything. It is highly doubtful that in a span of three million years any of the commanders from the first wars would be around to go make trouble for anybody. But you never know.

There were two asteroids that orbited this planet at right angles to each other, 2 gas planets, an ice planet on the far side, a liquid rocky planet near the sun, an unusually large and expansive (according to the Progenitor database) asteroid belt, a few moons that were orbiting around each other like a complex atom and that was it. I'm assuming that the asteroids were once planets themselves that broke up and the rest were captured since then.

No radio waves. Nothing.

Maybe I should make a call?

From every radio transmitter, from every sonar and radar device, from every laser pointed straight up at the sky to any nearby planet or star, the machines overloaded their systems to send out a deep pulse of energy to whoever or whatever might be listening; as a result of these actions several flying creatures and fish died as the energy broadcast overloaded their primitive nervous systems where they were then eaten by bigger predators and other creatures too dumb to die.

I'd hidden myself behind a rock inside a telephone booth made of copper, it still made my hair stand on end. I then picked up the receiver the Xeno-Commander had just gotten done fabricating for me, totally-not forgetting all the ways I could have used the brain interface to do the same thing. "This is radio N-O-R-M, broadcasting to you on an extremely illegal emergency frequency. If there are any police officers in the area that want to arrest me, please do.

"The time is now 1422, and the temperature is 141 degrees in the shade, with a 98% chance of being very hot for the rest of today and tomorrow. Severe heat warnings have gone up and down the coast, with chances of class five and six heat waves striking this planet within the hour. I've started catching up on all the reading I've missed out while working, because I'm now unemployed. There's nothing in the fridge –"

That was about as far as I got when a young 20-something Nicole Sullivan in a suit of battle armor fell out of the sky. "THUD!"

...

"Um, Oops?"