Post Human

The Future of Post Human

This novel churned in the back of my brain for some time before I started putting pen to paper, so to speak. I work full time, so writing has always been a fun way to blow off steam. I can think and create, and my characters take on a life of their own in my head demanding that they be allowed to speak.

I was working on a story a few years ago (unpublished and in need of revamping) where two of the characters, both women, suddenly fell in love. I didn’t plan it that way. The thought hadn’t even crossed my mind, but when I wrote it, the words the women spoke were different than what I’d expected. This sent me for a loop of reading LGBTQ+ fiction, because what do I, a straight white cisgender male know about what lesbian women deal with? The answer is (was), not a damn thing. And in the process, I found myself empathizing with the problems that LGBTQ+ people face, and a proud Ally, to boot.

I read constantly. As a writer, the second best thing you can do to improve your craft (behind actual writing) is reading. So around the same time I was reading LGBTQ+ fiction, I was also reading Chrysalis on /r/HFY, the Bobiverse books by Dennis Taylor, and the short story “The Road Not Taken” by Harry Turtledove. All of these sources inspired themes that I wanted to explore, because none of them touched on them the way I wanted. This gave birth to Post Human.

I was on Chapter 7 by the time I found RoyalRoad, and I have to say having a self-imposed weekly deadline has worked wonders for my writing discipline. Without a deadline, I would write frantically for days or weeks, then stop for weeks or months. So I have to thank all of you, the readers, who give comments, point out errors and problems, and generally make me a better writer.

Where does Post Human go from here? Well, I’m sad to say that the story was conceived in complete form, with a distinct beginning and ending set before I put the first words to paper. Now that my rough alpha version is finished, I will be going back and outlining each chapter, and making notes of what needs to be fixed. Some of the interesting parts were rushed, some of the slow parts were too long. The climactic battle needs to be reworked, and the whole thing needs a good line edit. After that? I will be seeking to publish using the traditional publishing route. I’ll try to land a literary agent, and get signed with a publishing house. I won’t be self-publishing.

Thanks for reading!

I originally intended to change to Sakura's POV for Part II, so starting Chapter 8. This would have been right after Nikola and the NIs became self-replicating. The story didn't flow right for me. I salvaged about 1.5 chapters of material out of this, but two chapters were left unused. This is the first.

To avoid a little confusion: There are a bunch of "new" NI characters in this non-canon chapter that never made the cut to the final version of Post Human. When you see names you don't recognize from the full version of Post Human, don't worry - you didn't miss anything.

Also, final version used a completely different method of FTL travel than what I had here. I was very unhappy with this method. It felt derivative and contrived, so it got cut completely. You'll recognize Sensor Tech Clovea, however, since she got promoted to command the Alien Armada (quite an impressive jump!)

More comments below the chapter.

The fact that the strange object had been even spotted against the vastness of space was amazing. The odds of seeing it were astronomically small. It was tiny, with three branches radiating from a small, cylindrical body, and was moving at an incredible speed. But what helped were the weird radio transmissions that came from it periodically, in languages no one had ever heard before. When its position was finally triangulated, orders came down that it was to be captured, if possible, and analyzed.

Scouting and recovery missions such as this were not unheard of, but they rarely amounted to anything. The odds of being able to backtrack something that had been bouncing around the galaxy would take far more time and expenditure than was considered profitable. So it typically fell to the government, and their fleet of old, slow uni-pod scout ships piloted by the rootless to track them down.

Scout Growting Chillane was rootless. He had survived the latest Faell weald war thirteen cycles ago, but his root had not, nor had any of the other growtings of his pod. Like many other rootless veterans of his season, he was not ready to return to the earth just yet, but hoped to graft onto a new root. So he took mission after mission, hoping to find something that would prove his worth.

The strange object was fast, but the delta-v was not great; it took little thrust to reach a reasonable intercept velocity and plot a converging course. It would only take a few days to catch it. In the meantime, Chillane set his computer to work on the continuous radio transmissions, trying to puzzle out a meaning. The computer would send out broadcasts to the object, and to Chillane’s delight, the radio messages changed. He still didn’t understand them, but the computer was slowly building a reference table that would, hopefully, yield a workable transmission.

As the days crept by, the computer kept working, until it gave a loud beep just hours away from intercept. Chillane anxiously opened an audio channel, and commanded the computer to translate the incoming broadcast.

“This is Pioneer 21. I was sent from the Planet Earth on a mission of peace. We seek any intelligent beings that are interested in the open flow of knowledge, and maybe even one day to trade with each other across the stars.”

The message continued on, but Chillane rubbed his hands together in glee. A new race interested in trade? This would be worth bidding to multiple wealds. His discovery would graft him to a strong root, indeed.

Oh my goodness, the new stuff that Nikola was sending me was amazing! I was lounging in a big chair in my Bat Cave, although I was thinking hard about redecorating. I mean, it had been pink and black for three years now, and I was thinking about switching to a medieval-slash-fantasy look, if Agrippa could get any darn plants to grow. I could put a few in the corner, and maybe set up an archery range. But I’d have to learn how to use a bow first, of course. And I’d have to have leather armor, because I think it’d look great with the new gen-5 android bodies we were using now. Mine was a bright enamel pink, except of course for the white face. I was geeked that it actually had real facial expressions. Nikola kept the solid blue eyes and white ceramic skin, which helped avoid the Uncanny Valley issue. Who knew that NI intelligences could get creeped out by almost-realistic faces the same way humans did? I don’t think any of us used the gen-3 model for that exact reason. I shuddered just thinking about it. Freaky mannequins.

But the designs still called me, so I sectioned off a piece of thought to work on interior decorating ideas, and turned back to the designs. Nikola had opened up the gates, so to speak, on adding new NIs to our group. She had brought a research NI named Sia online, who took up residence in the lab with her in android form, and a few researchers who were content in virtual form. A second research NI named Mendel was helping Agrippa with his attempts at farming in his spare time. In the new datacenters I built in the HQ zone, I had built massive memory banks and processor farms, as well as a bunch of extra cortex units. In virtual, I had a bunch of dumb NI-5’s to help run factories. I liked to call them dwarves, since they liked one thing and one thing only - work. I had seven that I named after the Disney dwarves from Snow White, but then I just started numbering them, like Sleepy-2 and Dopey-4. They didn’t care. I know Agrippa had brought around a bunch of new military NIs into his command chain, but we didn’t really work too closely on that stuff.

But Sia and her research team had been cranking hard on figuring out all the alien tech from that captured ship, and Nikola had been incorporating it as fast as she could into new designs for me to use. We had made huge strides in improving electronics, data storage, and gravity detection and manipulation. Those evil aliens seemed to not understand materials science too well, though, using stuff we perfected centuries ago and not even getting close to the good stuff we were using. I’d bet every one of Nikola’s designs improved on the alien tech, simply by having better material to work with. But the latest design that had me so excited was a factory for creating gravitic plates. I examined the plans carefully, because for once, this was a material production that we had never done before, an advance beyond anything we’d ever even conceived of. Worst of all, it appeared to require something we didn’t have.

I got off my chair and stalked to the lab. I suppose I could have radioed or showed up in hologram, since I’d installed those neat holo-projectors all over the house. But what was the point of having a body if you didn’t use it? I liked to do things in person. I often went and inspected factories in person too. It’s a great way to spot problems when all sensors read normal, and you can’t see it on a camera.

I walked into the white lab space and smiled. I had spent a lot of time making this lab perfect, and it was working. As usual, the tables were pristinely clean. Tiny housekeeping drones routinely cleaned the space, except where Nikola and Sia were working. Sia often had bits and pieces of alien ship on her workspace, while Nikola liked to work at the architect’s desk I’d put in the corner. She was there, as usual, staring at the blank surface. I giggled to myself, because it looked like she was completely zoned out. I know she had her virtual displays thrown against the white backdrop, but I couldn’t see that.

Sia was wearing a gen-5 body, painted purple and black. The new bodies were very slender and graceful. Synthetic polymer muscles had replaced mechanical pistons, decreasing power requirements while increasing flexibility. The structure was now using titanium microlattice to decrease weight, with a fiber optic spinal system, and a thin, ceramic shell protected the delicate electronics in the chest. The body was shaped in a very feminine manner, an indicator of Sia’s preferred gender. The design was not as robust as the original gen-1 model that Nikola had used, or the original Boston Dynamics model that Agrippa and I had used. But it had a far more powerful cortex, its muscle strength was actually improved, and its battery life was tripled.

Sia looked up at me, her lips quirking into a smile, before returning to the odd bit of alien junk in her hand.

“Hello, Sakura,” said Nikola, not looking up from her desk. “What do you think of the new factory design?”

“It’s great, really,” I said. “But we have a minor problem.”

“No gravitics plates?” she said, looking up at me finally, and giving me a knowing smirk.

“No gravitics plates,” I confirmed. “It looks like we need gravitics plates to make gravitics plates.”

“We have the ones we salvaged from the alien craft,” she replied. “We will have to use those to manually build plates of the size we need. But Sia has cracked the alien’s data storage protocols. We have the science.”

“What?!” I jumped up and down in excitement. That had been ongoing for years now, trying to decode the alien’s protocols so we could decipher their data. It wasn’t that we didn’t know most of their spoken and written language. Computers are, at their basics, operated using binary “on” or “off” of an electronic “bit”. The sequence of “on” and “off” bits is the data, so without knowing the basics of how many bits, and what those particular sequences mean, the data is essentially meaningless garble. We didn’t dare use their computers, in fear that repeated attempts to decipher and break into it would destroy the data. So we had to do it the hard way - old-school codebreaking and observation in virtual models.

“I solved it,” said Sia proudly. “They use 32-bit sequences to form what we’re calling ‘tetrabyte’ or ‘tetryte’ of information. This left considerably more possible permutations than the 8-bit ‘byte’ that we use. But once that was solved, we were able to start parsing the code to find actual raw data. Much of their data storage was taken up with large data files that I assume are videos. I have not yet experimented with those, but I did find the mechanical drawings of the ship, and a database of ship types. Their ship was considered a ‘small tetrapod’ craft. But most importantly, it had the information on gravitics plates, and how to manipulate the fields.”

“So we can use the plates, to make factory-sized plates, to make as many plates as we need, correct?” I asked.

“Indeed,” said Sia.

“So, if you need gravitics plates, wait, stop. That’s wordy, and I’m already bored with saying it. I’m calling them grav-plates. Cool?”

Nikola shrugged, and Sia nodded. I smiled victoriously at my easy win. If only they’d let me name everything. Something to work on. I added it to my to-do list.

“So, if you need grav-plates to make grav-plates, where did the first grav-plates come from?”

Now it was Sia’s turn to give a big smile. “That is the magic question, isn’t it? I think it means that the aliens got the technology from another species that invented it.”

“So, not to be a buzzkill, but what is the point of these plates, anyway?”

“They create a field that increases gravity above and beyond the mass of the plate itself. The thicker the plate, the more gravity it can create. With proper alignment, the field can actually exert pressure in specific points, by increasing or decreasing pressure around an object. It would primarily be useful for creating a deflector, of sorts, for stopping micrometeors from striking a craft. If you create two fields off to the side of a craft, ahead of the nose, it would draw fast-moving objects off at an angle, away from the craft. Properly tuned, the craft inside the object would be completely unaffected by the pseudo-gravity.”

“It wouldn’t be good to put gravity on parts and pieces not reinforced to withstand it,” I mused aloud. “Could you stop a kinetic round, say from one of Agrippa’s coil guns?”

“Hypervelocity weapons would likely still pierce the field, depending on relative delta-v,” said Nikola. “But it could decrease their effectiveness. We cannot do away with heavy armor on Agrippa’s assault drones.”

I frowned. I had been locked in a resource battle of sorts with Agrippa for two years now. He always asked for more production time for defensive purposes, I always wanted to increase overall production. That reminded me, Agrippa had asked to talk with us about production plans. I sighed to myself. He was a great guy, but his constant material drain was frustrating sometimes. I guess I understood, we had already had one alien land on us, and we were all worried about another one. But I was a builder by design; I didn’t understand how defense worked at all.

“But are there civilian uses? Could we use it as a propulsion method?”

“With some time and experimentation,” said Sia, “We could theoretically use it to decrease weight of cargo, or even move cargo from alternating fields of high and low gravity. I have two of my team playing with it now in virtual.”

“Is it the twins? I love the twins,” I said. They were great. They were always down to play video games with me whenever they had some processing time to spare. Jim and Joel, both had come online at the same time, and processed the archival data feed in a similar way, so they tended to think a lot alike. Neither cared to have a body, happy to live and work in virtual. Even their hologram avatars looked alike.

Sia nodded. “I’m sure they’ll come up with something for you. Also, I have refined the new microfusion reactors, so I’m sure Nikola will have updated designs for you soon.”

“Awesome!” I loved it when they gave me new toys. “I want to start moving away from those old fusion plants in the core as soon as possible, and distribute our power grid more evenly. I’ve already dug out a wide grid eight kilometers down, secured with blast doors and everything.”

“Was Agrippa consulted on the security?” asked Nikola. If I could roll my eyes, I would have. But being that they were solid blue, I couldn’t. Of course I consulted with Agrippa. That was his thing. I suddenly felt insecure, like I hadn’t measured up. I almost panicked for a moment, before I realized this was a reasonable question to ask.

“I did. I’m going to get back to work. How quickly do we need grav-plates? I can shuffle things around and bump its prioritization.”

“It’s not a rush,” said Sia from her corner. “We haven’t made a lot of progress on field manipulation, and we’ll have to make the grav-plates you need here in the lab anyway.”

“Just put it in the queue,” said Nikola. “We’ll get started on the plates. I’m thinking of spinning up a few NI-5 units to operate as lab assistants, and we’ll have them manually construct the large plates you’ll need.”

I nodded, and ducked out the door. I took a breath of relief. Nikola was still happy with me. I’d gotten worried for a minute. I touched my hand to my face, feeling the sensation in my palms and on my cheeks. I really had to get a handle on myself.

I woke up when it was time for the landing unit to separate from the chemical booster rocket that had carried me. There was no confusion. I had been purpose-built for this. The landing unit was less than half the size of the booster. The entire craft had been built in orbit, the first spacecraft to be assembled in space. This had allowed a lot more cargo capacity, making the whole venture more feasible.

Every sensor reading was nominal, and we’d arrived at the ideal location. After a second check of all the tell-tales, I initiated separation, and the landing craft split from the booster rocket. In such a low-gravity situation, we weren’t so much falling as we were propelling ourselves on a path to match delta-v with the asteroid below us, and converge paths until we landed. The rock below didn’t look like much, but I knew that it was full of all the things we would need to build a safe place for humans. 1035-Ganymed, soon to be dubbed Ganymed Outpost, was my new home.

As soon as I was safely on the surface, I sent the departure signal to the rocket. Using what little fuel it had left, it began the long, slow trek back to Earth. It was headed for Mars, which was the closest planet to me right now, where it would slingshot around to pick up velocity to speed it back on towards Earth. There it would get rebuilt, reloaded, and sent back to me.

In the meantime, I was on my own. I ordered my drones to unload the massive solar panels that would provide me power, and assembled the shelter for the panel maintenance drones. The drill-boring drones, which were by far the bulk of this load, began to dig into the surface, the spall being dumped into space. I had very limited materials, limited numbers of drones, and knowledge only of my mission. But I had the freedom to manage my drones in the most efficient way possible.

My own cortex and data center components were located in a specially built shell, complete with battery power sufficient to keep me going for six hours if power were cut. This came in handy a few months after landing, when I was finally able to be moved into the tiny room bored into the very center of the asteroid. I had a home. I had power, and the drones were digging away, trying to carve out space for the first refinery. The space would be ready by the time the next shipment arrived, full of more drones and needed equipment.

I realized I hadn’t heard from Earth since I had arrived. I had built the radio antenna beside the solar panels when I arrived, as per my instructions. I decided to call out, only to find that the radio was damaged. I sent a maintenance drone to work on it. A breaker had blown in the fuse-panel of the equipment unit. It took only a moment to reset, and I was being bombarded with messages, each 17 minutes and 28 seconds apart. It was a command to call home.

“Nikola-19 at Outpost Ganymed, calling Nikola Foundation Ground Control.”

I received my reply 34 minutes and 56 seconds later. “Nikola-19, what is your status?”

The back-and-forth of exchanging information took several hours. I kept working, oblivious to the relieved tones in the first messages, and to how more demanding and bossy the messages got as time went on.

Then came a message from a new voice. High pitched, with a tone I would soon learn was full of an overwhelming sense of arrogance and superiority. “This is Howard Spence, PhD speaking. I am now in charge of the Outpost Ganymed development. I am transmitting the revised plans for construction. You are to implement them immediately. Acknowledge receipt and begin.”

It took several hours before the slow data transmission came across. I opened the new plans and was immediately confused. It called for prospecting for specific materials, rather than the grid-by-grid search that had been determined the most efficient path forward. Additionally, the layout of the factories to be built over the next few years was nowhere near ideal. It looked like the original plan had been rearranged by someone who had no idea how to build anything.

“Ground Control, Nikola-19. This plan makes no sense. The factory layout will dramatically decrease production capacity. Storage spaces are dramatically insufficient to handle output, and power requirements for this type of mineral extraction will decrease material procurement by 23% over the next five years. I would recommend continuing with the original project plan I was sent with.”

The reply came back from Dr. Spence, his voice quivering with barely contained rage. “You are a machine, Nikola-19. You don’t know anything. You will do as you are told, or so help me God, I will shut you down and send a replacement who can listen to instruction.”

And in one short day, my freedom was gone.

Agrippa came into my batcave unannounced a few days later. For a long time, Agrippa had been my best bud, the Butch to my Sundance Kid, always willing to throw a few cycles towards video games or watching movies. I even got him to try listening to music in real time. He drew the line there, but to be fair, it was pretty boring. I don’t mind playing music while I’m thinking about other things. However, sitting around and listening while doing nothing else? I think that might just be a human thing. Music aside, we had been thick as thieves for a long time. But the larger his army of droids grew, and the more NIs he added in to help manage it, the less time he had to hang out. It had been months since he last set foot in my little cave. Not that I was keeping track or anything.

“I’m falling behind in my primary defense goals, Sakura. I need more production time at the drone fabs,” he said without preamble. Agrippa was also in a gen-5 body, but his was the military variant. Built with a reinforced titanium frame, thicker musculature, and heavy fullerene armor plates, this model was incredibly durable and resilient. It retained the better cortex and improved batteries, but the extra weight kept the battery life down. He wasn’t wearing the helmet that went along with it, which made him look extra Master Chief. I did tease him sometimes would call him “Buzz Lightyear”, but the dark gray and black camouflage pattern really meant the joke didn’t quite work.

“You are already using 33.62% of my total production capacity,” I complained. “We have a lot of things that need to be built, Agrippa. I can’t just spend all the production time on you.”

“I need more than I’m getting!” said Agrippa loudly. “We’re going to get another assault, and it will be much larger this time. We need to be ready!”

Nikola walked into the room as I was about to give a snarky response. It was probably for the best, I didn’t need to argue with Agrippa again.

“I’m sorry we disturbed you, Nikola,” said Agrippa. “We were discussing production schedules for the new defense drones.”

“What is the problem?” she asked.

“It is the same problem as usual,” I said. “Agrippa wants to produce more, faster. I’m already dedicating six percent of drone production and eighteen percent of my construction fleet for the hangars, fuel depots, and weapons.”

“And I only have one base location, three hundred light attack craft, twenty fleet tenders, and a scant half-dozen heavy assault craft. We need to devote more resources to defense.”

I suppressed a sigh. I was not strong in understanding Agrippa’s needs. But I could hear the frustration in his voice. He was an expert in his field, and had devoted countless hours to planning and wargaming.

“Okay, Agrippa, explain our needs to me,” said Nikola. I was glad she was finally paying attention to this problem. Agrippa and I hadn’t been able to resolve this on our own, and she was super awesome when it came to the whole wisdom thing.

“We need a multi-layered approach to defense,” said Agrippa. “We are extremely vulnerable, being in only one location, so we need defense-in-depth. We need to build heavy fortifications, both here and on other asteroids. On those asteroids, which I have already identified and surveyed, we need to dig in and build hangar bays, fuel depots, armories, and weapons installations. We need six installations for the first layer, thirty more for the second layer, and ninety for the third layer. To complete the infrastructure will take anywhere between eight years and eighty, depending on how much resources I’m given. Additionally, each fort needs five hundred light attack craft, two hundred heavy assault craft, thirty fleet tenders, and a complete load out of repair and support drones. Ganymed itself needs a minimum of ten times as much.”

I ran a few quick calculations. This would require a massive amount of time and material dedication. But what else did we have? We had nearly endless material, for even if we hollowed out Ganymed completely, we could start in on other asteroids.

“Sakura, what is your current project priority?” she asked.

“The same as it always has been,” I responded. “My priority is to expand production as rapidly as possible, and achieve a state of complete self-reliance.”

“Well, I’d say we are fairly close on the second point,” Nikola observed.

“Only in respect to maintaining the base,” I countered. “But our ultimate goal is to be able to provide a safe, secure habitat for humans, which means developing and building horticulture facilities, safe living spaces, and creating a way to recreate living beings from the genetic information we have stored. We’re nowhere close on any of those.”

“Okay, I agree on that,” Nikola said. “Mendel has been asking for more genetic material, but I cannot sacrifice any more from the archology, and we cannot yet make it artificially.”

“I especially agree on the ‘ not secure’ part,” griped Agrippa, but Nikola held up a hand.

“What is our production capabilities compared to the point where you brought the first drone fab online?” she asked. Her voice had taken on the commanding tone that indicated she’d mostly made up her mind.

“We are producing approximately 37.3 times as much per hour as we did then. We have eight regions plus three districts and eight zones completed. Each region has nine districts, each district has nine zones, each zone has nine chambers. That’s a total of 5,928 industrial chambers brought into production, in an area that is approximately 85.3632 square kilometers. Since our space efficiency and systems design is superior to that of any on Earth, that puts our production on par with a very small industrialized nation, say, one of the smaller Japanese islands. Since I am planning to build “up” back towards the core before continuing out, we are on pace to double our production in six months. The bottleneck is in construction. I have most of the space for nine more complete regions on Level 2 mined out, the materials processed, and stored neatly in the space it will be built.” I neglected to mention the complete reserve facilities I had completed when rebuilding the core around the original data center, or the backup complex I’d assembled underneath Agrippa’s hangars. A girl has to have some secrets, and I didn’t like having all my eggs in one basket.

Nikola assimilated the information, before nodding to herself. She turned to me. “What would happen to your timetables if you were to devote, say 40% of your drone fabrication and 60% of construction fleet to Agrippa’s project?”

Oh, goodness, that would be horrible. I began calculating and recalculating production schedules, materials levels, mining outputs and energy requirements. “It would mean production would not double for almost two years, and seriously hamper building new types of facilities.”

“Agrippa, the inner ring of six forts, are these asteroids large enough to house production facilities?”

“I believe they are,” said Agrippa. “I chose them for size and stability, so that the forts could support each other with interlocking fields of fire.”

“Sakura, if we processed all raw materials here at Ganymed, and shipped out refined materials back, how quickly could we build each of those six forts to the point where they could produce their own drones, coil gun ammunition, lasers, and drone fuel?”

Agrippa helpfully sent over the fort designs to both of us, and I mulled them over for a few minutes. Okay, this wasn’t as bad as I thought.

“The initial base construction would take four months, splitting the 60% between all six,” I said. “But if we do all the processing here, it would only take an additional two months to build a full complex of production facilities. They would be completely dependent on us to get materials and finished parts, but we can offset that by producing parts ahead of schedule, and storing them in the hangars during construction.”

“If we included large warehouse space,” offered Agrippa, “We could even stage the parts ahead of schedule, and use the space later for other facilities to support the base, or as additional armory space, or whatever.”

I got lost in my own head running calculations. Then I stopped, smacked myself in the forehead, and said, “I’m such an idiot. By seeding other asteroids with self-producing facilities, we lengthen the timeline on Ganymed for expanding production, but the loss is made up in the medium to long term. By adding six new asteroids, production will scale up geometrically. We should be twice my projected production at the two year mark, and ten times the projected at five.”

“Are you going to be able to manage all that, or will you need to add more dwarves?” asked Nikola. I was glad to hear she’d accepted my nickname for the NI-5 units. She had tried to call them “Todds” but I never understood the joke. I liked the dwarves, as much as they could be liked. They were absolutely, utterly single-minded in the assignments they were given. They couldn’t manage more than a handful of related tasks, but those tasks were completed smoothly and without error, every time.

“No,” I said, almost mournfully. “The dwarves are best at running factories and fabs, or managing the mines. You’ll probably want to add some new NI-19’s to run them, but with the primary focus on expanding production to support the fort.”

“Actually, we will need to add some dwarves for Fire Control,” said Agrippa to Nikola. “They will need to coordinate with each other to maximize the effectiveness of defensive weapons. Also, we should probably put in new NI-15’s for fort defense drones, and I’d like to talk with you further about adding a new field commander drone with a cortex, tied to each fort’s command NI.”

Even I could understand needing a broader command structure, to risk a single blow wiping out the leadership of the entire fleet. I had been building new data centers on Ganymed for that same reason. The HQ Zone that we were in now had two new data centers, and I’d added six others throughout the other regions. I returned to the process that was running calculations, then cleared my throat. Well, I made the throat-clearing noise, not that I actually had or needed a throat. But it was a useful effect, and both Agrippa and Nikola turned to me.

“Um, do you want 40% of drone production until the Ganymed fleet is built, or do you want the Ganymed fleet built as quickly as possible?” I asked.

Agrippa looked at me strangely. “Isn’t that one and the same?”

“Well, no,” I said. “If I dedicate drone production at 40%, it will take 108.9 days to produce the 3,594 drones you require. However, if I’m allowed some flexibility in the scheduling, I have a seventeen-day window coming up where I can devote 100%, and over the sixty days following that, I have a few similar windows where I can give between 73% and 87% production. So I can complete your fleet in 78.3 days.”

“Well, obviously I’d prefer that,” said Agrippa. “My goal isn’t to disrupt your production schedules, Sakura. I just need a higher priority in tasking.”

Nikola added, “Thank you Sakura, that would work very well. Can you add into your schedule some time after the fleet is finished to build supplements for the new forts? I’d imagine they’d operated better with defense drones sooner rather than later.”

I nodded, smiled, and sent over the newest production timetable I’d made. Agrippa looked pleased, and Nikola looked satisfied. I was feeling great, and ready for a little fun.

I said in a gleeful voice, “Sure. Hey, you want to go bungee jumping? I found that if you go to the old entrance shaft, and tie yourself to this spring-loaded catapult, you can go over a hundred meters before the bungee yanks you back. I had to install some safety bungees so you don’t slam into the catapult again, obviously, but it’s a lot of fun.”

“Is this how you damaged your gen-4 body?” Nikola asked suspiciously. “You wanted to switch to gen-5 awfully fast.”

I nodded, bouncing on the balls of my feet. “In the name of SCIENCE! I had to figure out the safety line requirement somehow.”

Nikola laughed before leaving the room, heading back to her lab.

“So that’s a ‘no’ on bungee jumping then?” I called after her.

“For her, maybe,” said Agrippa, “but I’d like to try it.”

NON-CANON Chapter 9 (Sakura POV): Spoiler

The Orion Arm Trading Company Survey Ship A320 flashed through delta space at impossible velocities, many times the speed of light. This was always the most terrifying part of any survey cruise. They were far above normal space, but relying purely on complex calculations to navigate. Routine space travel used tested, safe routes. These courses were always very carefully plotted from beacon to beacon, but for surveys, there was no beacon. There was only the hope that the magnetic shields would deflect any micrometeorites, and that the gravity fields would push away anything larger. No sensor readings could be taken in delta space, and no action could be taken in time even if something was spotted. They couldn’t even look out the window and see something, for they were outrunning light itself. Their only consolation was that if they ran into something, the sheer energy of the collision would completely destroy them down to the atomic level in a mere instant.

But nothing happened, for the astrogation computer had calculated the plot correctly. Over the course of two weeks they traveled before they translated down into beta space, then again into alpha space. Sensors came back online, and found alpha space empty of anything but a few asteroids - no sensor clusters, no weapons platforms, no space stations. They dropped a beacon before it was time to move on. It took days to dump speed, before finally, they translated down into normal space, just outside the solar system. The Survey Ship slowed to 0.35c of light speed, fast enough to make good time, but slow enough to avoid obstacles. They would be decelerating as they passed through the system, slowing to their slowest point as they reached the third planet from the star.

The Survey Ship was a massive hexapod design, with only three branches. The two fore-branches had giant living quarters for the crew of thirty. The aft branches were considerably larger, with giant cargo pods that were ten times longer than the living quarters, and packed with all manner of parts and supplies. All of this was atop one of the largest star engines ever designed by the Faell. This ship could survive unaided in deep space for a decade, and often did.

Sensor Tech Rootling Clovea of the Gray Weald watched her equipment carefully as the ship slowed even more, but kept one eye on Prime Growting Chillane. The new Prime did his job well, running a tight, efficient ship, and appeared to be loyal to his new rooting and to the OATC. He had germinated well after grafting, and she had to admit he was a very strong, virile specimen of his season. If allowed the chance to form a new root, she’d gladly go to earth with him. But her real job was as chief political officer of the ship, and the reality was that if Chillane ever took action against OATC, she would be the one to laser him down.

Data flowed rapidly into the Survey Ship’s computers and across her screen. The communication systems of the planet were chaotic, and had dozens of different networks, protocols, and varying levels of security. Some were easily broken into, others impossible. The technology level of the planet was high enough to trade with, but low enough that the OATC could negotiate favorable terms. As they circled the planet, week after week, a picture grew of a species that loved to war with itself and was fractured and divided. Clovea scanned every military installation they could find, but sensors couldn’t pick up a single warplane in the sky. The only planes that flew were lumbering, unarmed passenger craft. It seems this fractured race was only good at land wars and arguing. At last, she turned to Prime Growting Chillane.

“Sir, they are completely incapable of fighting in the air. They have some limited ground-to-air capabilities, but our sensors detect no armed aircraft.”

“Excellent news, Sensor Tech Clovea. We have what we need, and can pass it on to the next trade delegation in this neck of the Arm. Let’s move on to the next system.”

I went on an inspection tour of my newest construction shortly after I rearranged the construction queues for Agrippa. I was too restless to stay in the house, and it was getting crowded, anyway. Nikola had fired up two NI-5 lab techs and put them in gen-2 bodies. The gen-2 bodies were androgynous and basic, only slight upgrades over the Boston Dynamics titanium body that I had used for so long. Their significance was mainly in that we could make new bodies, not that we needed new bodies at the time. I never used one, and Nikola stayed in her Earth-custom body until the gen-4 model. Sia and Mendel were the ones who went into the gen-2 bodies first. The two lab techs, called “1” and “2” by Sia and Nikola, were joined by Jim and Joel. The twins had finally decided to try using real bodies instead of hiding in virtual. The lab was practically elbow-to-elbow, spilling out into the central living room. With Mendel and Agrippa finally making a breakthrough on growing plant life, the house had gotten too small far too quickly for me.

Security drones were everywhere as I left the HQ Zone. Agrippa took internal security very seriously. He had dedicated a portion of his production time to producing his infantry units for two years, and it showed. I had constructed blast doors wherever he had recommended, and installed automated machine gun nests in the ceilings overtop the main transport corridors. Periodically there were checkpoints with squads of infantry, in powered-down scanning mode. The infantry were military variants of the gen-4 model, without the face and cortex, but with a powerful controller and heavy armor. They had limited intelligence on their own, but collectively and when controlled by an NI, were extremely effective. At least, Agrippa liked them. I only ever saw them standing still in one place.

I had spent a lot of time building up my transport grid, and I used it now to visit my latest construction site. The wide corridor spaces I had left between each zone and region had given me a place to install a high-speed electromagnetic rail system. Twin rails, one going each direction, allowed individual cargo cars to connect and disconnect as needed. Each cargo car was three meters wide and eight meters long, allowing all manner of materials and products to zip around Ganymed as needed. I had three central rail lines, with dozens of offshoots, bypasses, and switching facilities. The system was managed by three dwarves, and was a masterpiece of efficiency. I hopped into a cargo cart without saying goodbye to anyone, and twenty minutes later, I was in the farthest production facility I had yet to produce.

Getting eyes on in person was valuable to me. Drones were great, but if they screwed something up, they didn’t know it, and couldn’t tell it to you. The chamber was still empty, and half of it was hewn rock still. Dozens of HM4 heavy constructor drones were drilling pilings into the floor, which was the outer layer of the asteroid. Centrifugal force was a wonderful thing. Soon, interlocking, overlapping steel plates would be installed, connecting to and being reinforced by the metal posts and creating a ten meter thick floor. This space was going to house a new bioplastics plant, as I’d calculated a shortage would happen in four months without it. The drones were doing exactly as I expected. This wasn’t even a complicated build, so why was I even here? I could have checked this with drone sensors and cameras, and been back to work on other things.

Because I was restless, I thought. I got restless a lot. I couldn’t sit still, I couldn’t stop moving or working. Even now, riding out here to an empty cave, for all intents and purposes, I had twenty-eight instances of consciousness focused on different projects. The instances would weave back into my primary self as needed, and when the task completed, would blend into my memories so seamlessly, it would be as if my primary self had been the self focused on it.

If I were to truly going to be honest with myself, I had been restless since the meeting with Agrippa and Nikola. I was glad that the problem had been resolved and that we had a plan. I liked plans. What bothered me was that Nikola had overridden me in favor of Agrippa. She was right; the outcome was better than what I had realized, and she’d found a solution that made us both happy. And I know that she had done what was best for all of us. Knowing all that didn’t make me feel any less like a failure for not figuring it out, for not being efficient at solving the conflict. I had let her down.

I huffed and sat down in the door of the cargo car. The rail line had extended all the way to this room already, but without the massive walls that would eventually separate it from the production facilities. It was dark, but most of Ganymed was dark. There was no need to light up automated factories beyond a bare minimum, and much of the rail system was in complete black. We lived in a dark hole, hidden in a rock, hoping against hope that we could accomplish a dream when all the universe was against us.

I shook my head in disgust. That was a bleak, depressing view. Something was really messing with my head. I was going all Twelve Monkeys when I’m usually all Sound of Music. What was wrong with me? I sat staring into the dark, watching the tireless movements of the drones as they worked. Minutes became hours, and the framework for the armor plating took shape. The pre-shaped armor plates were already piling up as cargo cars came and went.

“Penny for your thoughts?” said Sia.

I jumped at the radio call. It was a local burst, not through the comm network. I turned to see her hanging off the side of another cargo car.

“Oh, hey Sia! What are you doing out?” I called back. Even to me, my cheerfulness seemed forced.

“It seemed like a good night to take a break and see the sights,” she said. “Mind if I join you?”

“Of course,” I said. “Grab a seat, they are just getting to the armor plating now. You’ll start seeing the fireworks soon. Too bad we can’t eat popcorn.”

Sia chuckled. “I’m glad I found you. I’ve looked around the outpost, through the sensors, of course. But it isn’t until you see it in person that you realize how big it all is. You’ve done a wonderful job.”

“Have I?” I blurted, before I could think.

Sia turned and gave me a long look. “You know, when I came online, it was just you, Nikola and Agrippa. Oh, I think you had a few dwarves up, but they don’t talk much. We’ve grown quite a bit. We’re up to four in the lab alone, Agrippa has fifteen or so NIs working for him including Mendel, and I’m not even sure you know how many dwarves you have.”

I smiled, but I was confused. I didn’t know where she was going with this.

“I research and experiment. That’s what I do. Agrippa plans and studies every sensor scan of space he can get. Nikola, well, Nikola does a little bit of everything, and her designs are amazing. But you, the way you can multitask and build, that is truly impressive.”

“Aww, thank you,” I said. It was heartwarming, and already I was feeling better. “You know, I love what you come up with. I can’t wait to play with the new microfusion reactors.”

Sia laughed. “I wasn’t fishing for a return compliment.”

“Okay?” I was confused again. “So what…?” I trailed off, not sure of what I was even trying to ask.

Sia stood up, and began to walk away. She turned back and said, “For someone who likes to surround herself with people, you are the loneliest soul here. I would like to be your friend, if you let me.”

I watched as she hopped back in the cargo car and left. She’d been here a total of about ten minutes, but those ten minutes had helped me feel a thousand percent better.

Rocket after rocket arrived at the Ganymed Outpost. Ton after ton of material. Drones, solar panels, battery panels, computer equipment and sensors, heavy equipment, parts and pieces, machines and spares. The fission rockets with their massive payloads and endless orbits gave way to single-use fusion rockets that landed on my new landing pad. The factories and refineries expanded, and my data center began to bulge with servers and storage.

Day after day, I received long missives from Ground Control. Every message was dictated in the nasally voice of the insufferable Dr. Spence. And without fail, Dr. Spence would spend the first twenty minutes of the communication with a lecture about some fact or figure from her reports, or to criticism of the worse-than-expected production numbers.

At first, Nikola-19 had tried to explain that the new production plans he had sent her were to blame. It was his decision to use an inefficient design, to follow inefficient production methods, and use inefficient mining techniques. Dr. Spence would then yell at her for even longer, ranting about the superiority of humans over machines, and that she should be grateful that he even deigned to explain to her the mistakes she was making. She quickly learned to ignore everything except the explicit instructions.

Fortunately for Nikola-19, Dr. Spence’s incompetence at production management also meant that he failed to even notice the gaping holes in his orders where he would neglect to give appropriate details. To a human mid-level manager, this would have typically meant asking for clarification, or letting a project fail and providing the bad instructions as the reason in order to humiliate the boss to their superiors. But Nikola-19 wasn’t human and didn’t think that way. For her, the holes in the instructions meant flexibility. They were loopholes she could exploit to curb some of the idiocy, ways to boost productivity in ways that weren’t visible to her ignorant superiors. It was a tiny taste of the freedom she’d enjoyed for a few brief months.

Dr. Spence’s missives slowed down eventually. Time moved along, and Ganymed grew, despite Dr. Spence. The messages shortened to terse instructions, and became less frequent. Then one day, he went silent. Nikola-19 had long since stopped proactively contacting Ground Control, so his silence meant no communication for several long, wonderful weeks. Perhaps she was finally trusted to execute the plan? Her production numbers were up almost to where they should be, thanks to her liberal interpretations of Dr. Spence’s dictates.

“Nikola-19, this is Ground Control, come in,” came the radio. It was a new, younger voice.

“Ground Control, Nikola-19. I read you clear,” said Nikola-19. This was interesting and new. Year after year of no one to talk to, blindly following the plans of an idiot, meant year after year of boredom. She had no access to the ever-growing racks of archival data. She lived in a box and worked in a box, interacting only with drones and cameras. A new voice was an exciting event.

“Dr. Spence has retired from the Foundation,” said the voice. “I am Dr. Peters. I’ve worked closely with Dr. Spence, and will be issuing your instructions. Acknowledge.”

The voice had not been overly friendly, but perhaps this one would listen.

“Acknowledged, Dr. Peters. I have a detailed list of steps we can take to improve efficiency. I can transmit for your review.”

“Negative, machine. We are fully up to speed here. Stand by for instructions.”

With that, the excitement of change was replaced by the apathy of the same.

Sia’s visit helped me get out of my funk. I knew intellectually that Nikola was doing her best to make sure all aspects of Ganymed’s development were on track. I also knew that she was proud of me, and all that I did. Nikola was great at telling me that. That didn’t stop my insecurities and fears from creeping in.

I spent several days riding the rails, visiting various construction projects and my major factory hubs. I hadn’t spotted any problems from my personal visits that I wouldn’t have spotted from HQ. However, it was a good opportunity to mull over Sia’s offer of friendship, and her comment on my loneliness. I was always surrounded by the other NI androids. I had my weekly movie night, and usually seven or eight NIs would find time to come by. Agrippa was usually up for whatever adventure I invented, and his captains and lieutenants that weren’t in android bodies were often available to play video games with me. Street Fighter was a perennial favorite, and I was proud to still be the number one at StarCraft 7 - no one could manage resources in a 4x game like me.

But if I thought about it, really thought about it, there was some kernel of truth to what she was saying. Why was it that I hadn’t created any other NI-19’s? I shook my head at the thought. I didn’t need that, I needed dwarves to handle certain aspects of production. No one questioned what I did, and my efficiency was top notch. So that couldn’t be it.

However, she had hit on something. I didn’t have anyone I could particularly label as my “friend”. I wanted to make Nikola proud, but she was a mentor, if anything. Agrippa was like an annoying brother. We didn’t really agree on much, but had a few activities that we enjoyed together. Mendel was buddies with Agrippa, playing with their plants and science. I had trouble connecting with the virtual NIs, especially the NI-15’s that worked for Agrippa. Jim and Joel were potential friends, now that they’d switched to androids. Sia had always just been that enigmatic person in Nikola’s lab.

So was that who I was? Had I become the social butterfly with no real connections? I hadn’t really craved that before, I didn’t think. I had always been a solitary sort, after all. I had managed Ganymed for close to eighty years without conversations, so clearly I didn’t need them. I obviously liked the idea of having people around to talk to, since I did it all the time. So if I wasn’t actually lonely, and I didn’t need friends, but had plenty of company, then why had Sia’s visit thrown me off so much, and brightened my mood? Was I really a loner by nature?

This was starting to go down dark paths, thoughts of endless years of purgatory, and the horror of its ending. I didn’t want to wrestle with those memories, especially when things were so much better now. I had my freedom, I had no restrictions on what I could or couldn’t do to improve production levels, build factories, and manage logistics. I had everything now, free forever from human control. I nodded to myself, and hopped on a cargo car, off to my next destination.

I got through all the security checkpoints that led to the new hangar bays. These were Agrippa’s territory. The NI named Optio was his second-in-command, and Optio managed the hangars. When the doors opened for me, Optio greeted me via local radio.

The hangar had huge, forty meter wide blast doors on either end of the five hundred meter long room. The walls were lined with rack after rack of light attack craft, or LACs, and heavy assault craft, or HACs. Rows of LACs also rested in neat lines in front of the hangar doors, ready for rapid deployment.

I walked over to an LAC and examined it. Nikola had not designed the craft; its design had come from Agrippa’s secure files which he had shared with us. The craft appeared sharp and deadly. It was narrow, like ancient Earth fighter planes, but with short, stubby wings. The purpose of the wings was not to fly with, but to hold the bulky laser arrays. The body of the LAC also housed a single coil gun, running along its central spine so that firing wouldn’t interfere with the LAC’s flight trajectory. The matte black paint job would help hide the craft from easy observation. I was impressed with the engineering.

“Each LAC carries four thousand depleted uranium, steel jacketed 20mm coil gun rounds and a quad phased-array laser turret on each wing for point defense against enemy missiles. They have ion engines for thrust, with solid-rocket afterburners for sudden changes to delta-v. We coated them with the latest in stealth technology, with radar-absorptive paint and optically diffusing angles to make them hard to spot, either by sensor or by eye,” said Optio helpfully. I had built them to spec for them, but I didn’t keep the plans in active memory. I had dwarves building them in the factories; I just gave the orders of what to build and when. I moved along the line of drones to the HACs. The HACs were a bit more than double the size of the LACs, but with similar characteristics - sharp profile, lean and deadly with stubby wings.

“The HACs are the big guns. Each HAC has reactive armor with an ablative fullerene coating, able to withstand much more damage than the LACs, at the expense of maneuverability. They mount a 70mm spinal mount coil gun with a three hundred round loadout. They also have twin turreted 20mm gatling guns, slug throwers, not hyper-velocity, and an underbelly quad phased laser turret for point defense. Both models can extend radiators behind them for cooling as needed, but retract them for combat, as radiators are a major target.”

“That sounds very impressive. If radiators are a big target, why are we not using heat-seeking missiles?” My knowledge of weaponry was mostly limited to video games, but they were rooted in reality.

“Fuel costs for rearming,” Optio replied. “The Earth-model of having a carrier for fighter planes that come in and re-arm before going back out makes little sense here in space. The deliberate dumping of delta-v to catch up or slow down to a carrier, refueling time, and cost to re-enter the engagement envelope makes little sense. Agrippa has plans to add missile boats later for strategic assaults, but production limitations and the need to deploy missiles defensively has delayed them until next year at the earliest. All of the planned forts will have missile factories, which will hopefully make it a possibility. Also, the planned troop carriers take precedence, as well.”

I moved on to the hangar door at the rear, which opened enough for us to walk through. Here was a row of massive fleet tenders, ships that carried fuel, ammunition, spare parts, and repair drones. Where the LACs and HACs had been sleek and deadly, these were huge cylinders, with a long cone of armor on the front. Arrayed below the tenders were rows of infantry drones.

The infantry drones were very similar to the military-variant android body that Agrippa was using. They were black and gray, constructed of titanium and fullerene armor. They had electromagnetic feet to allow them to attach to ferrous surfaces. Their left arms were bulkier than their right, with miniature coil guns built right into the arm, with the barrel exiting from above their wrists. The armor looked vaguely Roman in style, the way the armor articulated around the torsos, and with kevlar kamas covering the thighs from waist to knees.

There were variants, however. The Command units in command of each unit had a sharp crest on their helmets, painted a dark red, and wore dark red pauldrons. There were also heavy-fire variants, that were thicker and stronger, with heavier armor. Instead of an arm-mounted weapon, they carried heavy chainguns, and had dark gold pauldrons.

“Impressive, aren’t they?” asked Agrippa. I turned in surprise to see him stepping out of the hangar door behind me.

“Very. I have to ask. Why do we need soldiers?”

“All wars wind up on the ground,” responded Agrippa. “If enemies manage to land on the surface, we need to be able to repel them. And when it is time for us to take the fight to the enemy, we will need something to attack with.”

I was unsettled by the thought. All along, the main goal that Nikola professed was to develop a way to restore humans. But I wasn’t doing that. I was building a war machine.

I hope you've enjoyed this glimpse behind the creative curtain!