Almost 2k views already! That's amazing. Here is chapter 3 for your reading pleasure. I have chapter 11 fully written, but since it took me about five weeks, I will probably slow down the update speed eventually. Not before chapter 10, though. Still, we're not there yet, so anything can happen in the mean time. For now, enjoy!

Chapter 3: Located

Dark hallway. Dark hallway. Boulder. Dark hallway. Dark hallway. Broken light. Dark hallway. Door. Dark hallway. Wait, what was that?

The limited sensors of my dinky exploration bot didn't show more than a wireframe outline of the world around it, but there was indeed a door set in the wall. It looked like a heavy door, with a large spinning handle in the middle that made me think of submarine doors. Luckily for me, it was opened, slightly. If it had been closed, I would have been out of luck. My bot was strong for its size, but not that strong. It couldn't have reached that high either.

The bot snuck its way inside and dropped into a room that was as wrecked as the corridor outside. It was a fairly small room. It wasn't clear to me what its purpose had once been, but I still directed the robot to make a tour just so I could map all the corners. Halfway through the scan I had the bot stop. Even the more than two hundred meters between me and the room suddenly didn't feel far away enough.

There was a skeleton slumped against the wall.

Well, half a skeleton. The right side was basically intact, besides missing a hand. The left side of the poor fellow simply wasn't there, like someone had hacked the guy in two from the head to the crotch. What had happened to the other half, I didn't know. I didn't want to know, either.

However gruesome it was to find something like this, I opted to look at the bright side. I now knew that there actually were humans here, courtesy of the human skeleton. Human civilisation was probably a lot more advanced than back where I came from as well. The heap of bones I'd found could be from some poor soul who'd been abducted, but that felt like too big a coincidence.

The bad side to all this is that there was a dead human inside a wrecked spaceship. This meant that the humans weren't in a position where they could offer any help to whoever was onboard, nor were they able to collect the scrap left over after the fighting. In other words this ship lost, and it lost bad. So, hostile aliens or factions of humans hostile to each other.

With a huff heard only by myself I set the bot back on track. Directing it did not even take half my attention, and now that that little bit of excitement was over I turned back to my other project. The controller I used right now was extremely simple; it was a touchscreen stuck to a radio emitter with smartmatter. The smartmatter had enough processing power for what I needed the thing to do, but not much more.

The grey block of computronium the size of a brick I was steadily building was my plan to fix my problems with processing power. It was made with material scraped from the walls and the rocks laying about the place. Rocks that I was fairly certain had once been part of an asteroid. How they had been mixed up with a starship I had no idea. Whatever their origin, they came in handy now.

No matter what I wanted to do, I was going to need more computer power. Working out all the many tedious tiny things for my little, simple exploration bot was about the maximum I could do without assistance. I wanted to go bigger than that. If I had to do it all in my mind, then I would be here for literally years before I got anything bigger than a dog.

That was one of the things I hadn't understood at first. I had very little blueprints for hardware, true. Software, on the other hand, that I had. In copious quantities. Setting up a program on my computer to fill out my basic designs into something that would actually work was as simple as uploading it straight from my mind. Seriously, I had like a dozen programs for exactly that purpose tucked away in my brain. The very limited mind controlling my exploration bot came from the same place. If I had had to program that bot myself, it would have taken forever to get the thing working.

Either way, with software not a problem I could turn back to my other problem. Power. Lots and lots of power. Preferably without it all exploding and taking me with it. Here too Forerunner science came to the rescue.

Fusion was easy, as I'd shown with my little bot. It was however not all that impressive an example. To compare it to what I was now working on, it was about the same as a wind-up toy. Converting hydrogen to helium in the inefficient, honestly rather slap-dash manner it did was rather embarrassing with the amount of knowledge I had. It had no way to get more fuel either; I had personally turned the water ice into hydrogen and oxygen for my bot.

Allowing version two to process its own fuel quickly became more involved than I had originally planned for. My original idea to set up a tiny electrolysis station was quickly expanded to more of a stomach. The new system would be able to 'eat', harvesting chemical energy in close to the same manner as I did. The primary use for this stomach was still to harvest hydrogen. To make that possible I made sure that it could digest far more than any biological organism I knew of. Everything from normal human food to plants, plastics of all types, fuel, and water of course could be processed for some energy and a surplus of hydrogen. Even some metal alloys could yield energy.

With plenty of hydrogen now always available, I turned to the fusion reactor itself. To humans of the 21st century it would be a marvel. To someone with the collected scientific knowledge of a millions of years old civilisation, it was cringeworthy. The only good thing I could say about it was that it was small. A few minutes of thinking how to improve the thing eventually saw me just throw the whole blueprint in the garbage and start over.

It took me a good ten minutes of designing and constantly reminding myself of my precarious situation to keep myself on track -yes, you can design a better fusion reactor, no, now is not the time to stand and gape at the fact that I knew how to build any form of fusion reactor at all- before I came up with something that a Forerunner might deem acceptable.

My new reactor was faster, could easily scale the size of the reaction to tweak the energy output and worked in several stages. It didn't just fuse hydrogen to helium, it continued to fuse to carbon and oxygen. This left me with more energy and a far more useful residue than the inert helium. That this new reactor was only slightly bigger than the first version meant I was extremely happy with it.

Now that power and software were fixed, I could start doing more important things. I was still alone in a hallway of an unidentified human starship wreck, albeit now one that had been lit up by my splicing one of my reactors into the lights. One exploration bot to comb the entirety of this ship would take far too long, so I needed to make more.

Once more, I went to work. This time the result was slightly bigger, about the size of a human hand. Instead of an ant this bot looked like a very weird crab. In place of pincers, it had miniature versions of my feathery-tentacle-engineering-things. It was also clearly mechanical despite the biological looking engineering tentacles. I really needed a name for those things, too, but such frivolities were for later.

The block of computronium now came into play. My version two bot didn't have anywhere near the processing power to use those engineering tentacles to anywhere their full capacity. It could instead send enough data to my new computer to let it do all the heavy lifting and then do what it told it to, neatly sidestepping that problem.

Setting the new bot to building a copy of itself under the direction of my computer I finally started to relax a little. It was just the start, but I was no longer alone and soon I would have a horde of robots shining a light in every nook and cranny of this derelict to make sure the only things moving were under my control and everything else was very long since deceased.

With a third bot on the way I decided that I needed to start thinking about mass production in a more controlled manner. Making self-replicating robots usually didn't end well in most fiction, and I had no desire to challenge that. The solution then, was simple. Make a factory to build more bots instead of letting the bots build more of themselves. For Forerunners factory meant assembler vat.

Building one of those took me a couple hours in which three more version two bots were build and my little exploration bot mapped more empty and broken hallways. The assembler vat was the size of a large shoebox, normally used to produce pistols in bulk. Material went in one side, bot came out the other side in less than five minutes. It required a bigger fusion reactor than I had build so far but I had those in the bag.

I felt a lot safer now that the number of bots between me and everything else was steadily going up. Resources were easily harvested from the walls and pieces of asteroid, and my exploration bot had mapped hundreds of meters of hallways with no end in sight, so I wouldn't lack for resources any time soon.

Speaking of the exploration bot, I told it to come back. My version two bots were faster and being made in greater and greater quantities so it was time I updated my first bot as well. I had already sent pairs of the newer bots out in all directions, burrowing through walls, floors and ceilings with little difficulty.

Still, I hadn't come across anything all that interesting after finding the skeleton. From the way the rooms had been partitioned and some of the debris lying around I had already deduced that I was somewhere in the crew quarters of the ship, but nothing else had been found. No more bodies, no texts, no signs, no paint on the walls. Nothing.

Finally, after five floors of empty rooms, a pair of my bots came across a closed door. The first one I'd found that hadn't been open at least partially. Excited, and hoping that I would finally learn something about this place I ordered the bots to carve through the wall.

The alloy that these people used to build was strong, but it couldn't stand up to being ripped from its place atom by atom. Silently the first bot scuttled through the hole into the new room. There, row after row of mummified human remains sat in benches all pointing away from the door. At the other end of the room was an altar and on the wall behind it, barely visible in the darkness, was a horribly familiar icon of a golden two-headed eagle.