3.6
o0O0o0O0o

"Hey dad, do you think I should have director Piggot replaced?" I wondered aloud.

He turned to look at me with a strange expression on his face. "What brought this on? Do you suddenly have the power to do that?"

I was washing the dishes after supper, and I had been thinking the issue over all afternoon. "Piggot's test of my range went wrong and someone kidnapped one of my runners. The thing is, she doesn't believe me and thinks it just ran off. So she has me installing bombs in all my runners and swoopers."

His eyes widened and I could see that he wanted to interrupt, so I held up a finger. "Don't worry too much about the bombs themselves, I already have a solution to that. Armsmaster even helped me with it and I think Dragon is also aware of what's going on. But the fact that she even tried it means I have a PR bomb that I'm pretty sure could take her out of office if I pushed it."

"We'll need to have a talk at some point about what you find important enough to tell me Taylor." He shook his head.

"To answer your original question though: what result would be better for you, the PR fight and a new director or dealing with you current situation?"

I thought about it. "It would depend on who they put in for the next director. Some of the choices would probably be alright, like if they just promote the deputy director, but some of the candidates would be just as bad or worse than Piggot."

Dad was stacking the dishes for me as I dried them. "Have you considered just quitting the Wards? I know you think they'll put up a fight about it but you haven't done anything wrong."

With the last plate done, I just leaned up against the counter to look at him. "Yeah, and I still don't think it's the best plan. When they get too bad with restrictions, I'll just make more stuff in secret. No sense in giving up the good PR of being in the Wards. Let them 'fire' me if it gets to that point. It would look better for me to be unjustly let go than for me to storm off anyway."

Dad mirrored my posture. "I'll leave it up to you, so long as you realize that you've got more options than to sit there and take it."

"Oh don't worry, I won't let them push me around. At worst I'll let them think that they're pushing me around."

I grinned. "I've had enough experience being shat upon from great height that I don't think they'd ever figure out that I'm not just grudgingly complying. At least the experience is proving useful for something."

"That's certainly one way of looking at it. I'm just glad that you're taking everything in stride these days. It seems like you've got a great big emotional anchor and nothing moves you if you don't want to be moved, anymore. I guess you do if you think of your network like that."

Standing up properly, I agreed. "It's a lot harder to bother someone when you're only interacting with, like, their left hand. Anyway, I'm going to go work on a biological targeting system for one of Kid Win's projects at my base. I'll be back before ten though."

I was almost out the door when I remembered, and stuck my head back inside. "Oh, dad! I'm getting an official public introduction as part of the Wards on Saturday. Want to come to the public conference thing they're going to have?"

He called out from the living room. "Sure, just let me know when. I'll be there. See you later."

o0O0o

Making a mass of neural tissue for target tracking was an interesting exercise. I took programming and instincts out of half a dozen templates for a good mix of motion tracking and object recognition, depending on what the input senses form the device were. It was even relatively easy to include one compound eye that could do a rudimentary job of motion tracking if the module stopped getting data inputs at all.

The difficult half of the project was the friend or foe recognition system. It was asking a lot of a proto-brain to tell 'who the bad guys were', when that was difficult for humans to determine sometimes.

The first part of the solution was to tag anyone who made an attack against the weapons platform itself, or its user. Also relatively easy was allowing for a radio controlled target designation with a handshake protocol so that no one else could steal control of the platform. Identifying a known list of allies was doable, although you would need to add them prior to an engagement.

The final step was a fairly sophisticated social comprehension module that allowed for people assisting known allies to be temporarily added as provisional allies, and anyone attacking someone from the allies lists would be added to the provisional enemies list, in descending order based on the surety of the chain of assumptions that led to their inclusion on the list.

Overall, I was satisfied that it would work as a decent baseline to improve from. That was the other advantage of a biological system of course, it learned from its errors and improved its own friend or foe recognition 'software' until it would have a far more sophisticated system than the one I had initially designed. It would be interesting to see how fast it learned.

I hoped that Chris would be pleased with the effects when I brought it in to the lab tomorrow after the Wards were off school. He had been really excited with his progress with making the integration module, as well as his success with modifying the cannon itself to accept the targeting information to auto track targets.

With that project complete, I decided to check to see what kind of surveillance the PRT had set up around the base. I was entirely unsurprised to find IR cameras in the back room, looking at where I grow things, which right now consisted of my replacement runner. The part that did surprise me was the sophisticated temperature sensor. It was actually a pretty clever way of determining if I was growing anything I wasn't supposed to. Growth, especially fast growth, was just always going to give off a certain amount of heat. So if you suspected growth that you couldn't see, measure the temperature.

Curiosity sated, I turned my armour invisible again and decided to visit the very rudimentary tunnel that the planter had finished digging from Captain's hill to my new, mostly submerged cave beneath the city. I hadn't finished draining and rerouting the water yet, so the whole thing was still underwater, but at least the first trunks of the seeds I had planted had made it down there.

My planter had been busy clearing space down there, so there was enough space to move around and start growing my commandos. I wanted to check out their development 'in person' even though I could see perfectly well through the eyes of my planter, and could feel the bases themselves. I guess I was still thinking 'body-centric' thoughts. Ha! For a hivemind that could be a serious disorder if not treated with care and attention. I'd better tell my hivemind therapist about it...

I needed the new base to grow the commandos because my garden base was now under surveillance and my boat base was entirely focused on growing the leader.

I think once I have my strike team, it is time to start expanding out of Brockton Bay properly. Set the planter on a few longer range missions to start long range relays and a new network of nodes in some secluded areas and I would be set. If I also started a new base at each location, and grew a new planter from each base, I could start expanding geometrically.

It would also be cool to start a true sea base. I wouldn't worry about deep sea trenches yet, but planting out on the continental shelf a ways would be a cool excuse to go swimming all the time, and exploring the sea bed a bit.

It would take me months, since I was focusing on slow and steady, but I would eventually be large enough to help people the way I wanted without being threatened by idiot politicians with being nuked.

I wasn't an idiot, I could see the pattern that my templates painted. I estimated that if I focused on nothing but growth and consumption, I could cover the entire planet including the seas in less than a year. Probably even half a year, depending on resistance from parahumans. And I was getting very good at estimating these days. To do so would also mean forgoing my humanity though, and I wanted to use this power to uplift and protect humanity, not consume it.

Enough philosophy. I was at Captains hill, standing before the well concealed entrance to my new base. In simple terms, it was a large boulder that looked naturally placed. I had actually brought it to this specific location in the dead of night last week with the planter. Lifting the thing was right on the edge of my capabilities, even with my armour, but I rolled it aside, then crawled in the surprisingly tight hole.

I didn't want to have piles of excavated dirt everywhere, so most of the tunnel was made by displacing the soil, and then by pushing the excess material in to the cave to be consumed later. I crawled a ways, before the soil gave way to soggy hard packed earth, then rough gravel, then finally the limestone that the cave was made out of. By now I was underwater, but with my suit I could breathe with no problem.

Even without my suit, I could breathe underwater, or use the same anaerobic processes as my creatures to function without oxygen entirely. It was just very uncomfortable in my human body. That, and the fact that operating without oxygen made me very sluggish and burned calories like they were going out of style. There was a reason that basically no organism with the option of using oxygen went without.

Crawling through the last of the tunnel, I finally reached my new base. It wasn't much to look at. In fact, until I ignited my bioluminescence, it wasn't anything to look at. Light simply didn't penetrate this far down.

It was otherworldly down here. Twisted structures of mostly dissolved stone, undisturbed for thousands of years, illuminated by a ghostly blue glow from my suit. The pulsating growth pods that held my immature commandos certainly added to the air of unreality.

Clearing the stone would take time, and I didn't want to rush and cause a sinkhole, so I would slowly be building a shell of bone-like walls to support the roof. Then I would crush the stone within and feed it to my growth pods for material. With the space clear, I would slowly use the water as well, until I was left with a watertight cave of bone beneath the city itself. It would take weeks to do properly. The aesthetics of it would be cool if nothing else.

I knew that the first set of commandos would be ready less than a week now, although the second set would take until the leader itself was complete around the beginning of March. The tunnel would have to be slightly widened to get the commandos out of here but they could dig at it from the inside to prevent any disturbance at the tunnel entrance.

The commandos were growing just fine, although still at the very infancy of their development. Interesting to me was the fact that the swords were developing right along with the creatures themselves, already in hand ready to use the instant they emerged.

The swords themselves were somewhat of a mystery to me. Theoretically they were just made of reinforced bone with some modified neural tissue and an exotic crystal structure running down the core. Admittedly very strong, but I knew instinctively that they would be stronger than they should be in the hands of my greater templates. There was some explanation for why only the larger templates could wield the boneswords properly, and it had something to do with those extra structures in their brains. I was just starting to be able to see the edges of the explanation. Even a week or two ago, I'm not sure I would have been able to sense that something was odd about them.

Hopefully I would be able to figure it out, because the ability to produce meta-materials with physical properties greater than they should exhibit was extraordinarily valuable even if they had to maintain contact with one of my greater creatures to continue to show the effects.

Already I could picture a multitude of uses. Unbreakable tethers, unpierceable shields, and impenetrable armour. Or at least greater than they should be. I wasn't arrogant enough to believe they would be able to slow someone like the Siberian.

It also answered a question I had floating around my head since I got good enough in my understanding of math and physics to work out that the largest ground based templates shouldn't work. If they rigidly adhered to the rules of physics, they would be able to stand, just. Even with my improved biology they would be straining to stay up the entire time. The bones were plenty strong, but muscles just didn't get strong enough to move them like they would need. They certainly wouldn't be able to run, and yet I knew that my titans would be able to run and move startlingly fast, never mind for a creature that size.

I think now that my internet connection was up and running, my next major project will be to contemplate those extra brain structures, and some of the more exotic synapse creatures. I felt like there was another level of understanding about my own network that was just out of reach.

It was a strange mix of very advanced math, some high level physics, and philosophy of all things, but gaining an understanding of the nature of reality to a level that I could start to affect it would be an immense undertaking and the sooner I started, the sooner I would start getting results. I hoped. There was a distinctly non-linear nature to the understanding. I wasn't sure if I could reliably predict the applications of the information until I understood them anyway, making trying for specific effects or nuggets of understanding an exercise in frustration.

In video game terms, I was blindly exploring the tech tree with no idea what had dependencies on other branches and no idea where any particular branch could lead. At least I would never be bored at this rate. Even taking in to account my growth, it would take me anywhere from decades to centuries to actually understand some of the effects I would be using to a level that I could start developing them in novel directions.