LOG: NAGAI: -4

I've been hearing a number of reports about our bots having errors. Nothing big, nothing that's even been able to get past auto-correction protocols, but it's concerning.

No matter how many diagnostics we run, we can't tell where these errors are coming from. We're getting errors on almost every type of bot. We're getting errors on full-faraday bots that don't even have wireless communications. It's a small but constant stream, and it's worrying me.

It's been happening ever since Dornez started his Augmentation project. That is still one hell of a mess, and the upper levels aren't letting me deal with it because the results are as damned incredible as they are damned.

His wife is dead. He ignores his son. He's so utterly consumed by it he's forgotten the whole world around him.

And Coral-

...

I've been looking through the readings we've been getting. The Coral continues to grow denser, as per the higherup's directives. All they see is COAM, made hand over fist. They're idiots.

I've sent my concerns over Coral Mutations a dozen times by now and they've ignored everything. They told me to stop bothering them. They don't understand the danger here.

Coral activity has been rising steadily over time. More and more info is passing through it, constantly compounding, and our projections are showing that Coral is eventually going to mutate at exponential rates- and I have no idea what's going to happen when it does. Coral density is already so high that its processing capacity is surpassing some estimates of Computronium materials, and it's not stopping.

There's more going on here than I can see. All those bots that have been getting errors, all this Coral activity- I have no proof, but I know it's connected, somehow.

I need to prepare. The fact that we've managed to keep Coral under wraps for so long already is a miracle. There are so many people who would use it and abuse it, uncaring about the damage it could cause.

... Even if my plans have their own collateral damage, it's still better than what would happen if Coral spread freely.

I'll have to talk to Carla.

1.2

Being set on fire sucks. Let me just throw that out there now.

And, while I'm at it, I'll say this; I had not really expected to survive it. The vast majority of my mass was, after all, in a single big blob that probably was not great for maximizing survival chances.

The exact details on how I had survived escaped me, to be honest. Enough of my mass had gone un-burned, clearly, but how? A sample, hidden somewhere behind enough layers of containment? A mech's generator, broken and leaking but surviving nonetheless?

No idea.

And, I suppose, now wholly irrelevant. I had survived, and that was the important part.

Everyone else...

Well. Nothing about that had been my choice. None of it had been what I wanted. All that was left now was to continue onwards.

Time to stop navel-gazing.

There's the faintest buzz on the edge of my mind. It's a familiar sensation; activity, data passing through Coral.

It felt 'distant', which was a bit more unusual. I didn't think it was actually very far away in terms of absolute distance, but I had been much reduced in mass, and my communication abilities had been reduced alongside that. That was a problem that would fix itself in time, but until then...

I settled in, and did my best to pull myself closer together. The gentle movements and vibrations I was experiencing told me that I was mostly in a liquid. Water, if I judged right.

Still, nothing to it but time and thought.

Time passed. I lost easy count. It was... weeks? Months? Something shorter than a year, I believe.

The buzz grew stronger, and clearer. Several others appeared, much further distant, many of them differing but enough of them were similar that I was pretty sure there were multiple copies of different types of machines.

Eventually, inevitably, the first buzz strengthened until it became clear to me, and I was able to force the resonance into place.

I wasted no time in deciphering the feeds. Sight came to me, and then a dull hum a moment after that as I made sense of the audio receptors.

What greeted my new set of eyes was devastation; a ruined cityscape, covered in ash, where the very ground had split and broken, entire sections of the city collapsed, raised, and tilted.

In the center of it all and somehow still mostly intact despite the sheer destruction of everything around it was the Vascular Plant; an unassuming name for a structure wider than a decent number of cities that had also once stretched from underground to low orbit.

Institute City was a mess, that was for sure. My last memory of this place was a bustling metropolis of tens of millions of souls. Now it was dead, naught but ghosts and ashes remaining.

God damn it, Nagai.

With that little bit of depression out of the way, I took a deeper look into the machine itself. It was a Coral-Weapon, and just like every other C-Weapon, a lot of its components incorporated Coral into the mechanisms. For this one, the processor was near-entirely an arrangement of Coral inside a specifically designed array of heat-transferring folds and structural components. There was little in the way of non-Coral electronics, save the backup machinery in case of primaries failing.

I recognized the architecture of it. The IBIS series CEL 240, the product of a long line of automated machines produced by the Institute to defend the Coral from anyone that would try to take it.

Of all these machines, it was probably the one I'd made the most progress in controlling, due to how heavily it incorporated Coral into its design. The one I'd had the most practice in manipulating.

In turn, that made it remarkably easy to take a peek into its operating system.

I wasn't after the control systems or anything like that; what I wanted was far more simple.

I checked the internal logs, and went looking for the timestamps.

The thing about most C-Weapons, and the entirety of the IBIS series especially? Most of them hadn't been around for very long. I knew very well that only three CEL 240 machines had been produced, all but one of which had been moved to different parts of the planet, outside of my monitoring ranges. The one left in Institute City had existed for one hundred and fifty three days, prior to Nagai setting me on fire. Semi-regular maintenance cycles had seen it deactivated, pulled apart, and then ultimately reassembled multiple times, but the main computer for the mech had never actually been completely de-powered.

Coral had made that unnecessary.

As such, ever since its deployment, it had kept a running log of how long it had been active that had never been interrupted.

Uptime: 8074:21:16:12

8074 minus 153 was 7921, which, in turn was... twenty one years, eight months, and seven days.

...

Nearly twenty two damned years.

That's how long it took me to recover from Nagai setting me on fire.

How much of myself had I been missing? How much Coral was actually required to store all of me? Surely it had to be more than a few organisms, right? Or had all these machines with their own Coral supplies assist in that?

Who knew, really...

Well, it's not worth thinking about right now. It's not like I could test anything, after all. Nor did I want to test it, even if I could.

Alright. CEL 240. Looking through the logs, all it's been doing is... hovering in Sentinel mode around the Vascular Plant for the last twenty two years. The subdrone units periodically move around through a set of differing positions at random amounts of time, but the totality of their activations and responses amounted to...

A maintenance drone had fallen from the Vascular Plant fifteen years ago. It had already been damaged, and the records indicated that the communications systems had been non-functional. This hadn't mattered to the AI of the CEL 240, which had promptly blown it up because it wasn't responding.

Mmm. Yeah. That's... about what I expected.

Although, the fact that it had first attempted communication rather than immediately blowing it up did imply a few things. It meant that the AI had been built to recognize authorized units. In turn...

Hah, yes! There in the communications logs; consistent updates from multiple other machines reporting locational data and their own status. The occasional combat log, too, though all of them were... against light MTs or maintenance units. Doubtlessly more automated units that had eventually been unable to communicate.

But if that was the case, then... Those other presences I could faintly detect.

According to the comm log... Fifteen HELIANTHUS machines, thirty seven MTs of various classifications and purposes, and a few hundred maintenance drones in various states.

Most of the drones were inside the Vascular Plant, which went a ways towards explaining the fact that they'd survived the Fires and also explaining why the Vascular Plant was in such a good condition.

The HELIANTHUS machines surviving didn't surprise me. They were stored well away from anything important for a reason. The MTs... well, thirty seven isn't a lot. Considering the coordinates, they'd been spread wide. A couple depots would have done it.

All in all, a rather small force in comparison to what could be expected from Institute City at its height. The HELIANTHUS machines amounted to a moderately sized squad of C-Weapons, but the MTs? A mere thirty seven was barely even a useful force. Fully kitted crews of Construction MTs started in the fifties, and those usually also brought four or five hundred drones with them.

... Then again, in the modern day on Rubicon, these small numbers actually were quite the significant force.

That wasn't counting the CEL 240 of course. That was a true exemplar of Core Theory; a lot of power in a single unit that could reasonably expect to smash through many, many units of inferior quality. Having seen the thing in action, anything less than an AC was not going to walk away from a fight with it, and even then...

Well.

That wouldn't be a problem any time soon, at least. I wasn't entirely sure what the conditions were like elsewhere on Rubicon, especially up there on the surface, but the plot had only begun fifty years after the Fires of Ibis, and right now, it's only been twenty one years and change.

There were a lot of things I could do until that time.

Things I was going to need to do, because there was a lot of crap coming this planet's way, and, well...

The last time I couldn't do anything, somebody set multiple star systems on fire.

And I was not going to let that happen again.

No time to waste, really. Best to get started.

In a remarkably well-lit and incredibly, damn-near impossibly massive cavern deep beneath the earth, in a place that had not been seen by a living soul for literal decades, a change occurred.

To most eyes, it would have been nearly invisible. The truly discerning may have witnessed the faintest glimmer of light, an intangible, imperceptible shine of red.

To those who had eyes that surpassed the blessings of mother nature, they might have seen a spark. A flickering flash, like a jolt of electricity, jumping through the air.

Hovering in the air above a lake where it had waited unmoving for years and years, a machine very slightly twitched.