A/N: I totally didn't forget to copy and paste the work I did onto 's format to post it here. In fact, I was simply too lazy. But you didn't see that.

Anyway. I did it one week after I said I would "maybe" do it. But it's here now. The next chapter is still being written. It's slow going, but it'll be posted eventually. That aside, I hope you, my dear reader, enjoys this chapter. Feel free to throw ideas at me or criticize me. I can't stop you, now can I? Ahem. Enjoy!

Chapter One: Nanites Are Awesome

It was not fine at all. I shouldn't be able to form coherent thought after that mind fuck.

When I first read that now infernal text, I subconsciously figured: "well, now I'll know what's going on in my empire all the time." And this is true, but it was far more in-depth then that. Imagine for a moment what it would be like to simply understand how a gun worked. No real background knowledge other than "pull the trigger, and the bullet goes out the barrel and hits something", but then you suddenly get an intrinsic understanding on how a gun worked: the muzzle velocity, every piece and it's place on the gun, It's weight, etc.

Take that imaginary circumstance and multiply that by thousands to thousands.

Not only was it guns, but also how lasers, rail guns, mech-suits, fucking anti-gravity! And now I know how it all works now. I could be thrown into a cave and make an anti-gravity generator if given the time and resources. It's an incredible experience. But it's incredibly painful for my grey matter- not that I have any as a disembodied spirit-thing.

However, not only do I get that techno-babble brain cram, but also the general stuff, like I mentioned, with simply knowing the ongoings within my empire. For example, I know that I have 4 fleets of military ships, one fleet of strictly corvettes, another fleet made up of Destroyers... why? Who the hell makes destroyers? Cruisers and corvettes are both more useful. If you're making destroyers then you're not playing right. Destroyers are too slow to have good evasion, but also don't have good armor or weapon mounts like a cruiser. You also learn the cruiser soon after the destroyer.

The third fleet is full of escorts and Battlecruisers. Yes, the Fallen Empire's version of Destroyers and Battleships.

For some context. The tech tree for military ships goes like this: Corvette (Base Tech) —— Destroyer —— Cruiser —— Battleship—— Titan —— Juggernaut —— Colossus.

Titans are limited depending on your naval capacity (with a max of 20). While both the juggernaut and Colossus are limited to one per empire.

Fallen Empires however, have escorts in place of destroyers, and battlecruisers in place of battleships (they also have titans and colossus). These ship classes also punch above their weight class, no small part being the technology boasted by the decadent empires, but also because of the way the ships are laid out in terms of weapons and armor.

However, everything I know about layouts for ships is completely trashed. Normally a corvette can choose from a few sections, such as a missile boat with a small weapon slot and a missile/torpedo slot; as well as a few slots for armor/shields, and one for a component of some kind. However, now the classification is just a size generalization. A corvette could have a dozen weapons on it, or a battleship could have three.

Hilariously, I could make a corvette larger- to the point of being the size of a battleship, and a battleship the diameter of a particularly large moon. I could make my ships look the size they do in the game, which means I could have a Space Amoeba larger than a planet. Which is just insanity, what would I do with an amoeba that large?

This also means that destroyers can actually serve a purpose; but then again I have escorts, which are better... but then all of this designing thing is also completely different, so maybe not.

The point I'm trying to make is that this isn't Stellaris. Sure, it feels like Stellaris, but there's a lot of differences, it feels more real, and not just because I'm not dreaming this whole thing up. However, for the sake of simplicity, I'll use Stellaris references and draw the conclusions based on Stellaris, like with those ships. That sure won't screw me over in the future!

With that out of the way, we can firmly plant escort between cruiser and destroyer, and battlecruiser between battleship and titan.

I pause, looking around the galaxy before me as if it held secrets I couldn't quite figure out. I completely forgot where I was going with this. I started with abruptly understanding how to make technological marvels, (comparative to early 2000's earth). Continued into my military fleets, went off on a tangent about how the ship designing was on crack... oh I remember now, I forgot the fourth fleet.

Yeah, that fourth fleet is just a massive, moon-sized ball of nanites. I gleamed the reason for that from the brain cram I suffered, so that's good. The reason being is quite simple; making a prototype (or prototypes).

Nanites are normally only able to be found in the L-cluster, or things related to the L-cluster. The L-cluster is a small neighborhood of about six or so star systems that cannot be reached by hyperlanes. They can also house any manner of things, from giant space-faring dragons, to a race of sentient murder-frenzy nanites, to a small empire of people that just defeated the nanites that could normally be there. It can also be straight up empty, or have a singular person-sized, ultra compact form of nanites known simply as Gray. It's a pretty cool event chain that can give serious benefits, or give a crisp and solid bitch slap to the unassuming player.

In this galaxy? It either doesn't exist, or it's further away then where this empire has currently explored. I haven't gotten any memories of coming across an L-gate (the only way to get to the L-cluster), or knowing if other empires who have. Thus, this empire had figured out the sciences and theory behind nanites by themselves.

In the game, you could use nanites to make a special building called the Nanite Transmuter that uses nanites to make two of each of the main stream strategic resources; Volatile Motes, Exotic Gases, and Rare Crystals. To upkeep the building you'd need nanites in some capacity, and if you ran out, it wouldn't produce anything. Usually, the only way to acquire nanites in any way is getting lucky with Anomalies, which is a randomly spawning events in the game that appear when a science ship surveys a celestial body, or from busting into the L-cluster and getting a nanite deposit on a planet or something that you could harvest.

Instead of that, nanites are simply made, rather then harvested. And they aren't used as upkeep, and are instead part of the cost to build a building like the Nanite Transmuter. On top of that, nanites were also used in a special component that repairs hull and armor Hp on ships, and a special edict that increases research speed.

Nanites are incredibly versatile, and this empire seems to be trying very hard to use them to their fullest advantage. Nanites used in all types of construction, cutting build time into fractions of what they would be normally. Super weapons that bathed planets in nanites that would then turn all organic matter into energy or usable material.

Nanites are scary. This is definitely the part where somebody would say the clichéd, "I'm glad you're on our side!"

However, I am the side. Being the un-challenged leader to a collective consciousness of robots... is...

Oh.

That's why you read the fine print. I'm a tool and a fool. One of -if not the only- reason I got my brain smashed with information is because this empire is a collective consciousness. There isn't an untold number of individuals in this empire. It's ONE individual. And that individual is ME. Everything that was researched was technically researched by one individual. Which, again, is now me. Now, the question is how this is supposed to work.

Am I like the Geth from Mass effect where the "individuals" are just a specific number of systems dedicated to running the individual? Or am I like a hive mind where the individuals are more like hard-wired to serve the hive mind, but are still technically individuals, but more like semi-sentient animals? Or perhaps it's simply me, myself and I, where I'm the only mind in general? It definitely requires some experimentation. Experimentation that I definitely don't want to do right now.

Returning to the fourth fleet. The moon-sized swarm of nanites was probably worth a few hundred thousand alloy's worth of nanites. I instinctually knew that they behaved similar to Gray from the L-cluster event. I could turn a specific number of nanites into basically whatever I wanted. Population to work? This number would be worth hundreds of Pops. Ships? Well if the massive swarm of nanites isn't enough for combat, then just make more nanites! Or, maybe just make them into a star-system spanning mining operation?

Now that has my interest. My production of minerals and alloys is rather low, only about 10,000 minerals and slightly under 1,500 alloys. A mass of nanites dedicated to mining and processing definitely wouldn't be a bad thing. You know what? Screw it, these nanites are a prototype, may as well make them do something!

I begin my painstaking search from my home system, and gradually expand outward in search of a suitable system. After a few painstaking minutes, I eventually find a suitable system: binary stars with two gas giants with three moons each. Three planets larger than earth, one of them being over five times as large. Two planets smaller than earth. Among the five planets, three of them had moons, they were all slightly larger then the moon orbiting the earth. After planets, no there were asteroid rings around one gas giant and one large belt between the third and fourth celestial body from the twin suns.

There were only three mining stations in the system, and the production was only five minerals and eight energy in total, so I wouldn't mind completely stripping the system for everything. I'll even make a Dyson sphere here later as well for some extra energy.

This is making me giddy. I'm going to start making more nanites right goddamn now. I need more of these wonder machines! I can do so much with them!

Wait-wait-wait. Nanites are inherently Von Neumann machines. Von Neumann machines are machines that replicate themselves ad infinitum. Which means I don't need to focus on my production.

Within the next instant, I've ordered my nanites to focus on replicating themselves with the resources they mine. Of course, it'll still take a while for my nanites to get to the designated- nevermind they're there already. Jump drives are a helluva drug. And dangerous technology. This is fine.

With that taken care of, why don't I start making more fleets of nanites to continue this elsewhere? Infinitely multiplying nanites was never a bad idea!

~~FMGC~~

It turns out that infinitely multiplying nanites was indeed an amazing idea. That last thought before I went to work wasn't foreshadowing at all! In fact, it was such a good idea that my nanites have completely consumed three-dozen (read: 36) star systems. And I mean completely consumed. None of that leaving the suns. No, that's weak. My nanites, instead of stopping at the planetary bodies and asteroids, turned to the sun for more material.

I was too busy building more nanites from factories and completing some empirical exploration to notice what they were doing. But when I got a mental ping that a Nanite was finished consuming a star system, I hopped over to the system in delight. It then rapidly cooled into confusion.

I didn't immediately know that the star had been extinguished. I couldn't see my nanites, I couldn't see anything in fact! All I saw was inky blackness with pinpricks of light signifying distant stars. It hit me in the next moment when I tried to call upon the nanites within the system, and I knew that the nanites were there.

I was immediately flooded with interest. How had the nanites survived? Or done it so quickly?

The answer was rather simple; storage dimensions.

The little buggers found out (the hard way) that they were not, in fact, resilient enough to survive multi-million degree temperatures. So they improvised and adapted. They made connections with the dimensional storages, made more (somehow), and projected small entrances to the mirror dimensions to deposit small amount of material. Normally this wouldn't work because the sun was incredibly-incredibly hot. But the nanites got around this by scooping up only a few thousands of atoms at once, rather than hundreds of millions. The amount of nanites were also enough to create a nearly innumerable number of windows at once, so the atoms were able to cool off quick enough to not cause any damage.

Basically, they turned a sun into it's base components without ruining anything.

The only problem I have now is how the nanites increased the size of the dimensional storage area without my input. If the nanites could do things autonomously, then they either have some special subroutines that dictate their actions; they knew they wouldn't be able to fit the mass of a star into a comparatively small space, so decided to make it bigger. Or they're separate intelligences from myself, which means this is no longer just me.

A quick skim of the programming showed that it was and is simple subroutine. It has a few limits as well, one being the inability to build something that puts any type of resource into negative production, or the ability to attack neutral/friendly ships/planets/stations/pops/etc.

From then on I wouldn't let that happen, it was a scare and a half! If I start making sentient robots, I'll be doing it on my own volition, not on accident, especially when they're just simple miners.

After that first happenstance, I sent a eleven swarms the size of the original blob into systems that had very little total income -max of ten of either resource at a time- and let them gorge themselves on all different elements on the periodic table, even a few strategic resources they found, and go to two other systems before I stopped them from continuing.

So here I am now, 36 full systems consumed, and an innumerable number of nanites.

It would behoove me to use the nanites as construction material. Sure, they were quite worthwhile to scrap into alloys. There were enough nanites that I could probably make a dozen ring worlds on a whim, but I had a better idea.

Nanites were good at construction. So why not send the total of twelve massive blobs of nanites to a system and make a megastructure or three? The resources would be fed to them via their ability to open the storage dimensions, and their huge quantity would allow them to make the mega structures in weeks at the most. The only thing stopping me from doing that was the sheer amount of options available to me.

If I had a body, I would be muttering off all of the different ones that caught my eye aloud, but alas, I only have my thoughts.

There was a forge that used the fuel of a star and material of a solar system and the star to make a truly ridiculous amount of alloys, as well as some excess energy.

Or a different kind of forge, built around a neutron star that did much the same, but produced 50% more resources, as well as a special strategic resource that could be researched to do... something, while also passively increasing the armor and hull Hp of everything I owned and built by 10%.

Or maybe a Dyson Sphere that worked on black holes that traded a pittance worth of minerals in return for a huge amount of energy. It could also be used to create a bomb that could eviscerate neighboring star systems.

So many choices, and the ability to make them all.

So why not?

I sent the nanites off into the depths of space with a simple pulse of thought that basically said "make mega structures until you can't anymore."

That wouldn't bite me in the ass. Right?

Nanites wouldn't betray my trust. Right?

I couldn't help but let out an exhausted sigh. Time flows very oddly for me, and I have no idea why. Those nanites took months to devour those systems, but it felt like less than a day to me.

Yeah. I've been awake for a full 24 hours just doing random experiments and learning new things. One of the most important things I figured out is how technology and research works.

In a game of Stellaris you would make districts or buildings that provided research income. The most common of these is the Research Lab which provides two researcher jobs, (jobs are taken up by one pop that runs that job) and produce the resources associated with that job. For a researcher, you'll get a specific amount of research income of the three different research trees: Physics, Society, and Engineering. The income can be increased (or decreased) based on different modifiers.

After income comes your head scientist and your chosen research. Like I mentioned, there's three types of over-arching research options. Because there are three, you need three scientists, one for each. Each scientist has a trait that makes them useful for a type of sub-option. There's around 4-ish sub-options for the three research options. An example would be Field Manipulation. Field Manipulation is part of physics, and there are a few technology's in the physics tree that has the Field Manipulation mark on it. If you have a scientist with the Field Manipulation expertise that's researching a technology with the Field Manipulation mark on it, then they get a bonus to researching it.

Bonus research is rather important for technology. The way it works is it takes the research income for one of the three scientific schools, and puts a cumulative, additive bonus to it.

For example: you're researching "Neutronium Materials". It's part of the research archetype of Engineering, and subtype of Materials. Your total income is 1,000. You have a level one scientist (bonus 2% per level) with the Expertise: Materials trait (15% bonus). Through other researches, you have another 10%. The total bonus is 27%. Because it's additive, it takes 27% of 1,000, and adds the number to your total income for whatever you're researching. So now, with a total of 1,270 research income, you're researching faster.

Another thing to note is stored research. If you have 1,000 engineering income towards your next research, and have six trillion stored engineering research, you'll only have a max of 1,000 stored research going into your next research. This balances out the game, if you got very lucky with anomalies in the beginning when your research income is a pittance (probably around a total of 100 for all three archetype combined), then it would be broken if you got 600 research into any one of those researches instantly. Instead, you can only, at a max, double your current research income.

Now take that, and scrap all of it. I gave you a whole training video worth of information just to say "but that's not how it works here!"

Jokes aside, most of it doesn't apply. That stored research cap? Nah, that's bullshit. If I had six trillion stored research, I'd be almost literally unstoppable. The higher research costs can hit half a million (which is a lot) so six trillion would catapult you so far into the future it wouldn't even be funny! Another thing we scrap is scientists. Or leaders in general. I'm a gestalt consciousness with only me, myself and Irene -I! I mean I- as an individual. Leaders require some kind of individuality to even exist.

So; 'how does research work then?' Well I'm glad you asked! First things first though, is understanding my predicament. As an individual governing a bunch of robotic automatons, it requires a certain amount of power that no human could possibly posses: the ability to well and truly multitask. I don't know how, but whatever happened to me gave me the ability to multitask. Not in the simple way of "reading and talking", which you may think you can do, but it's really just you switching between reading and talking rather quickly; and even then. You're have to go back and read over a sentence over again.

I wasn't so limited; indeed, I could possess every robotic automaton within my empire for a year, and do what I have been doing, without a problem. The only problem with that is that I don't want to. Actually... I have a completely new idea, but that's for later.

With the ability to multitask as efficiently and effectively as I prescribed I could, why won't I? Well, aside not wanting to, I'm new to it, I'll probably mess up a lot along the way, and I'm in a volatile position at the moment. I need all the focus I have to figure out myself. So, what will I do to start my research? If I'm not available to focus on research, nothing will happen. The solution was simple. Make something that could.

It was actually rather simple, because I'm not biological, and mostly spiritual and mechanical, I was able to just... split my consciousness. My alternate self was unfeeling, uncaring, and completely geared towards micro-managing my empire and researching. I would name this, and any future Alternate-selves as simply; Parallels.

This Parallel also had all of my technological knowledge and anything that pertained to technology. To help visualize the effectiveness of my parallel, it's research bonus as a "leader" was a 57% increase to research. It's only trait was "Infant Spliced Parallel" and it provides a 55% bonus. The other 2% came from it being level one. What truly shocked me was that it didn't have a level cap.

Normally, the un-breakable max level cap for a leader was ten. The only way to increase it was with technology, traditions, species traits, and a few other things, but couldn't go over ten. Which meant that a scientist would have a 20% bonus to research at max level; excluding any traits.

What this means is that this Parallel could be level 20, granting a 40% bonus. Or level 200, granting a 400% bonus.

That was broken. Very broken. Also, that tacked on "Infant" title was interesting. Technically, my Parallel is me without all of the emotion and consciousness and sentience. But it was me. Did that mean I was also an "infant" in these terms? That's... insulting. However, it also makes sense. I'm only 17; and in the age of the galaxy, 17 was almost literally nothing. It could be quantified as less than a blink of an eye in the age of the universe. I wonder how long it would take for "Infant" to change to something else. Would it give a bonus to the leader? I'm sure I'll know in time.

Anyway, that's the technology out of the way. Now, onto traditions, because those are always fun.

I'm going to forego a training montage worth of information, and just stick with the basics.

Traditions are like technology, but use "Unity" as a resource, which is gained in similar ways as research income. The difference is there's like ten different tradition tree, and they all have five unlockable traditions, and a sign-on bonus if you open the tree. So it's more like 6 traditions. Anyway, upon finishing a tree, you get an extra bonus, as well as an ascension perk. There are wight Ascension perk slots to go with the seven you choose (there are more then seven tradition trees, but you can only pick seven). The eighth slot comes from a technology known as "Ascension Theory" that gives you access to an extra Ascension perk, as well as edicts that use Unity as a resource to activate. You usually activate these special edicts when you've finished all Tradition trees because the cost is equal to the amount of unity needed to purchase your next tradition.

Ascension Perks are variably powerful bonuses that are quite nice. They can give you access to new ships, megastructures, or just give you a small boost to different resources.

True to my word, I kept it short.

Like research, traditions are different. But where research changes were more entwined with leaders, tradition is more linked to the idea of producing unity. I'm an individual, and as an individual, I can only be so different at any given time. Traditions represent the sociological and cultural evolution of an empire. But I'm alone, and I can only sociologically and culturally evolve so much.

This all culminates in two changes: I don't have traditions, and I cannot produce unity in any capacity. I intellectually know I have all of the bonuses as if I unlocked all traditions, but I don't produce unity to unlock them. On top of that, I also don't have eight Ascension Perk slots. I have all of the slots. Of course, I can't have some perks that involve governing ethics, like how Consecrated Worlds requires an empire to be spiritualist in some manner. But I have everything else!

This also means I have Ascension Perks that only biological empires should have. Most notably being the Ascension Paths. Those are Psionic, Biological, and Synthetic. Synthetic makes sense a little bit, but Biological? What the hell is that going to do for me? Or Psionic? Can I even use Psionic power?

Ugh, this all so ridiculous. Am I going to return to a biological empire? Hell no. Am I going to figure out how to use psionic powers as a robot? Hell yes.

Now that I'm done with that, I need to relax. My parallel is doing the actual work, my nanite swarms are doing whatever it was I told them to do, so I'm ready to relax. Hmm... can I sleep?