System log: The Bunker, Site 3
Solar Calendar: Year 2249(?)
Current status: Active repairs, D.M.H.E.L.L. protocol active
Log 7
The relatively short walk from the ‘medical service center’ to the ‘jail room’ provided Gamma enough time to parse through a list of repair plan options before settling on the candidates that satisfied the greatest number of needs and priorities. It also balanced the plan against the perceived trustworthiness level of each runner, narrowing down the options to the most realistic repair plan. Once the group of runners were once again before the terminal in the archive room, the program activated the terminal screen and speakers.
“Detecting humanoid lifeforms, commencing scan,” Gamma announced in its fake robot voice. “Do not move.” Using one of the still functioning projectors in the ceiling, the program ran a red laser light over the runners. The light functionally did nothing, but the humans didn’t need to know that. According to the D.M.H.E.L.L. protocol, Gamma was meant to feel a level of amusement towards their nervous reactions, which, it supposed, it did.
“Emergency repair crew detected,” Gamma continued in the same monotone static voice. “Displaying repair priorities.”
With a simple command execute, the program displayed a map of Site 3 onscreen. The humans were briefly able to see an undetailed shadow of Site 3’s center module before the image zoomed in. What was shown was an active three-dimensional rendering of the space the runners could identify. This included: the facility entranceway, the entrance hallway, the mall lobby fa?ade, the small corridor leading to the record room on the left, the small hallway leading to the medical service center on the right, and the unvisited second floor of the mall lobby. Allowing the humans a moment to analyze and understand the map, Gamma then highlighted the locations in need of repair on the map. The program included each problem with a description of the issue, and the corresponding results once fixed.
The boss of the group, Donaldson, focused first on the most obvious and most critical work order on screen. “Repair hardwire connections to the entrance,” he read aloud. “This will restore critical power to facility defenses at the entrance, including door closure. Seems pretty straight forward to me. What do you think Mr. Apprentice techie?”
There was that word again, techie. Was it similar to the words ‘hulk’ and ‘vanguard’ used by the humans earlier?
The younger man, the human Sloan, who had once again plugged into the terminal to read the data, nodded slowly. “Depends on what the damage is,” he mused as he read through the more detailed information Gamma allowed him to see. “The defenses worked when we arrived, so at least one cable should be mostly intact. If we have to replace the entire line though, we normally wouldn’t be able to without ripping out every surface to reach the wires, not to mention the question of where we’d get the cable wires to begin with. And that applies to a lot of these other ones too.”
“Like here,” Sloan indicated one of the blinking dots on the map. “There’s an issue with the air circulator for this part of the ruin, but not much besides a general location of where the problem is. It could be anything from a clogged pipe to a demolished part of the ruin. The other one, which I think is a little more critical, is over here on the second floor.” He pointed at a different dot. “It’s another power issue, but this place seems to be . . . some kind of industrial room. Maybe a fabricator of some kind.”
“Wait wait wait,” Ryan spoke up, his arms crossed. “I know I’m not exactly the tech sort, but it sounds like you’re saying we have a security issue, an air issue, and a parts issue. Is it just me, or does that seem kind of, uh. . . circular?”
Sloan seemed to blink in surprise at the larger man for several moments. “Um, yeah, that’s right. If the doors stay open, we risk dying from further intrusions. If we get the doors closed without the air running, then we risk potential suffocation when the oxygen is used up. But both issues likely will require new parts to repair them, meaning we need the fabricators, if that’s what this room is for, working, which also might need new parts and still exposes us to danger from the open doors.”
“Sounds like a bad game of rock, paper, scissors,” Ryan noted.
“It does,” Sloan nodded. “And the repair part requirement is basically adding ‘gun’ to that mix. Everything else here is minor, but still critical: checking gas and water pipes for leaks, restarting the waste recycler, moving the stalkers remains to the industrial room after fixing the elevator-”
“Can we take a moment to reflect on Ryan actually saying something smart?” Dina interrupted.
“Hey,” Ryan groaned, while the rest of the group laughed.
The boss coughed after allowing the mood to lighten. “You mentioned elevators Sloan?” he prompted. “As in, an active lift?”
“That’s what it says,” Sloan shrugged. “The terminal isn’t providing me with information on this vault’s other floors beyond the main hall’s second floor, only that the elevator must be repaired in order to move the stalker remains up to the second floor.”
“Why?” Dina asked.
“Cause they’re heavy?” Ryan put in.
“No, not that,” Dina huffed. “Why should we be moving the stalker remains? Does the terminal say anything about that?”
“Uhh,” Sloan muttered, eyes flicking back down to scan through the data. Gamma subtly provided the answer, as it had not included a reason initially. The program couldn’t help but feel a twinge of, annoyance? Drones obeyed without question, while humans needed a reason to follow orders. Such a troublesome species, but that was merely human nature according Dr. Plummer.
“Found it,” the young ‘techie’ announced. “It says here, that, the facility wants to recycle the bugs . . .” Gamma wondered what the issue was as the human Sloan trailed off. Like he had said, it was a perfectly logical use of the resources on hand, much like how Gamma planned to recycle human waste into edible foodstuffs, and eventually as fertilizer for the hydroponics. What was the issue, and why were the humans all looking at each other with such mixed expressions?
“I know what everyone’s thinking,” the boss finally cut in with a sigh. “In an ideal world, selling the rare earth metals from those scrap heap bugs would have netted everyone a good deal at the guild. It sucks, but think of it as an investment in fixing this place to not only keep us alive, but enrich us later. We recycle the bugs, everyone agreed?”
Reluctant nods came from all around, and Gamma quickly adjusted its H.I.P. parameters to include a level of human need, want, and greed in future calculations. Evidently, not even the end of the world could eliminate capitalism; this was a reference joke from Dr. Plummer, obviously it was impossible for life to exist without resources and the ability to acquire said resources. Gamma disabled its self-justification programing temporarily and focused more processing power back on the humans.
“Anything else we need to know Sloan?” the boss asked.
“I’m reading that a lot of the infrastructure we’ll need access to is hidden,” the younger man revealed a moment later. “Whether its false walls, switch activated doors, or trapdoors I can’t tell, but there are maintenance tunnels that’ll make our jobs easier if we can find them. No guarantees of their condition though; just start poking around the general area where the problem should be.” At his direction, everyone plugged into Sloan’s exosuit to download the work order data. Unlike him with his scanner and small terminal reader, everyone else had to rely on a small screen built into their exo-suit arms to read the map data.
“Okay people,” the boss commanded the attention of the group once the data transfer was complete. “Here’s what we’re going to do. There are three major objectives, so we are going to split into three groups of two, check out each place, and regroup to discuss each situation. Sloan, check out the fabricator room, and Dina the entrance. Twins, split up between Sloan and Dina, doesn’t matter who is with who. Ryan, you’re with me, we’ll check out the entrance. Regroup in 15 minutes people, and keep an eye out for tool lockers, fake walls, or anything else that may make our lives easier. Move out.”
As the humans left the records room, Gamma turned the majority of its attention back to the more pressing matters on hand. While the group of humans had been distracted, it had taken the liberty of using the 10 construction drones summoned to guard its core to secretly take away the body of the stalker brute and one of its lesser. While it would have been easier in the core room, per safety standards it had commanded the bots to take both bodies up to the fabricator room by one of the paths hidden by facility damage. Using the still operational scanners once they were hooked up by the drones, the program had been hard at work analyzing both types of machines.
Its inner report went as followed:
Thanks to the damage done to the machine’s computer core from combat and age, Gamma was almost effortlessly able to pierce through the weak digital defenses to scan, copy, and analyze all available data. Even if it hadn’t used a dummy core to tank the digital countermeasures, including two rather insidious self-replicating viruses (-error- hyperlinks blocked), the five other dummy cores on top of Gamma’s quantum encryption firewalls, to say nothing of the other defenses, would have been enough to overcome any issue.
Of course, the program did have the dummy core dumped into the recycler incinerator automatically once the job was done. ‘Better safe than sorry’ had been heavily encoded in its programming, though not as a core personality module, as its designers had acknowledged Gamma likely would be required to take some level of risk to accomplish its mission. It was digressing again; somehow topic drift had never quite left human A.I. development even after two centuries.
Returning to the main topic, Gamma took the liberty to classify these new machines as ‘invader machines’, or I.M.s for short. Without access to its other memory banks related to the topic (-error- data not found), the program was starting over from scratch to build a new memory block devoted to ‘enemy combatants’. Interestingly, both the stalker and the stalker brute appeared to be made of local earth materials judging by the half-life of certain atoms in conjunction with the timeline of the I.M.’s creation.
This implied specific use of Earth resources was an odd choice given what limited knowledge the program had on the enemy’s material science. By what it had seen and heard so far, the invaders had won a decisive victory while Site 3 had been intombed beneath the ground, and yet humans remained. Moreover, it was clear that the use of local earth fauna as the baseline form for the I.M.’s hinted at . . . something, unsettling.
According to its scans and subsequent dissection of the I.M. form, Gamma detected several odd design choices in the stalker body that lowered efficiency in its purpose as human killers. Had it, the greatest intelligence humanity had ever created, been the one designing a machine for express purpose of killing humans silently, it wouldn’t have allowed the design of the stalker to be limited by the form of a praying mantis.
Dr. Dilbert, the creator of file/Design and file/Logic, had never visually recorded himself and had only left audio logs for Gamma. His voice played as Gamma accessed the relevant file.
--
“Innately, human creativity is a two-sided coin,” the doctor’s voice played within the computer core. “As a species, human creativity is shaped by both the culture learned during childhood and the desire to bypass the constraints left by said culture, until that too becomes part of culture. We constantly push the boundaries, but always leave behind new ones in our wake. Such foolhardy endeavors falter in the face of efficiency, yet efficiency by its nature cannot create something entirely new.”
The voice sighed. “While regretful to have such a limitation, that is the reality, and logic pushes us forward regardless of reality. The process, thus, when creating something new is always the same. Determine the problem, create a solution, test the solution, then either try a new solution or solve the problem. Design is no different. There is no such thing as ‘ugliness’ or ‘inefficiency’ when creating a design; those are aspects of application and creative expression. Design has no need for that, for it only slows down the process. Make it work, then make it fit within whatever confines culture forces onto the design.”
“If one ever comes across inefficient designs, then always assume it to be purposeful. While the reasons may be different, political pressures, resource management, cultural identity, etc., by analyzing the inefficiencies we can gain insight into those reasons, and design countermeasures in return. A common saying is to never assume malice when action or results can be explained by incompetence. That is never the case with design. Every choice, is made with clear and decisive purpose.”
--
“Every choice, is made with clear and decisive purpose,” Gamma mused. “Then, why were these choices made?”
The main reason why the stalkers suffered power storage issues was that the equipped battery was insufficient for the complex machine’s needs. The form of praying mantis limited the size of the battery, a heavily inefficient decision on the part of the designer. As the invaders were clearly not incompetent, then the design was an intentional choice by the designer and, judging by the human’s repeated reference to ‘bugs’, had been and continued to be a theme in I.M. design.
It didn’t make sense logically, but if Gamma followed the directives of Dr. Dilbert then, creatively, the form hinted at a dark humor in the intelligence behind the I.M.’s; an unleashing of pestilence and famine on the world of humans by an endless swarm of ‘bugs’. Or perhaps, an in irony in facing forms familiar to the planet and being the cause of its downfall?
That being said, just because Gamma knew of the existence of these ‘bug’ type I.M.s, didn’t mean there weren’t other types of I.M.s based on other earth faunas or floras, to say nothing of alien forms. Perhaps they were common in this part of the continent only, or numerous other reasons. Not that this mattered at the moment.
Certainly, the unknown ‘worm’ I.M. mentioned by the humans to have been the cause of their entry into the crater, a forbidden zone to them no less, and how it had ‘lit up the crater in thermal-grade fireworks’ while likely being the cause of Site 3’s accension, did not provide the program any comfort.
In the background of its processing power, analyzing the I.M. designs invoked new core modules in Gamma: file/Creativity and file/Design. The former had been headed up in development by Dr. Forsooth, the other co-creator of Laugh.exe besides Dr. Plummer, the latter by Dr. Dilbert, who’d also lead work on Logic.exe. Compared to the other lead designers, Dr. Dilbert had the fewest recorded logs in Gamma’s memory banks, and as noted earlier did not provide any visual recording logs.
Dr. Plummer’s records were (-error-, data not found), but images of a friendly-faced woman had popped up upon bringing information on Dr. Forsooth. Her records were also (-error-, data not found), but at least her photos were still accessible. Notably, her red hair had gone from fiery to very light by her last appearance. This fact invoked the Sadness.exe program in Gamma momentarily before it shifted its attention back to the fabricator room and stalker bodies. It couldn’t afford to waste processing power on, less, . . . on irrelevant information.
As it turned out, the stalker bodies were perfect targets for recycling, judging by the scan results. Not only did they contain much needed metal alloy Gamma could use, but many analog parts could easily be recycled without incineration and used on other projects and repairs. Once the fabricator room was working at full capacity again, breaking down each stalker body would take about five to ten minutes-
Real life time finally caught up to Gamma’s time as it detected the incoming arrival of Sloan and one of the twins (the program seriously wondered when it would be getting any names for the duo) to the fabricator room. The ten construction drones had left a little while ago once their services were no longer required and returned to work on the foundation with their fellows. However, that left two large and heavy metal alien bodies on the floor when the two humans walked in. Needless to say, they were quite taken aback.
Sloan and the female twin exchanged bewildered looks before finally shrugging. Evidently, the nature of ‘ruins’ like Site 3 allowed for such weird events to occur, to Gamma’s relief. Not that it had made a mistake or lost track of real time. It had meant for this to happen. Certainly.
The program wondered when its self-justification program had turned back on. A quick check confirmed a hard lock on extended disabled status of the program.
While the twin examined the stalker bodies curiously, Sloan walked around the room with his weak passive scanner, relying on the data he’d ‘taken’, thanks to Gamma, from the terminal to examine the room. In truth, due to the damage to the facility, Gamma itself wasn’t quite sure of the degree of damage to the room, and many other parts of Site 3. Many of its active hardwire connections and wireless sensors had been disabled in the ascent, though that may have been for the best given the I.M.’s sensitivity to wireless signals.
“Hey, can you give me a hand here?” Sloan called out a few moments later. The female twin walked over and helped hold part of one of the fabricator’s walls up while Sloan removed screws with a multi-tool. He helped the twin lower the metal sheet to the ground when he was done, before poking inside with a light and his sensor. When he was done, they did the same to each fabricator, and then the wall outlets each fabricator was connected to.
“Okay, I think this is enough for now,” Sloan said when they were done. “Let’s head back down and meet with the others.”
The female twin gestured at the stalkers curiously. Sloan shrugged.
“We’ve seen drones moving things,” he said. “Getting a head start on moving them up here isn’t strange.”
Simultaneously, Gamma watched the other human groups investigate their areas. The boss, Donaldson, and Ryan had managed to break into the broken security room that looked into the entrance hall and find the Jeffries tubes that allowed maintenance access to the wires and other hardline connections. Gamma didn’t have access to the unpowered cameras in the hall, and had lost sight of the duo after they entered the maintenance tunnel.
The same had happened with Dina and the male twin, once the duo had finished knocking against the walls of the general location for their work order after finding the false wall. Once they’d climbed into the Jeffries tube, Gamma could no longer see them. It could still hear them though, as the echoing sounds from the tunnels made it out into the lobby where the program’s sensitive microphones picked them up.
As it turned out, the group of humans needed 20 minutes instead of 15 to regroup in the lobby instead of the initial 15, a failure to meet deadline Gamma noted for their records.
“Okay, so Ryan and I think we found the issue,” the boss reported first. “It looks like when we forced the door open, we accidently pushed it into a damaged bundle of wires that had fallen from the ceiling. I think we can fix it if the door is moved enough for the wires to be shifted out of the way if we have some welding tools and insulating tape. Dina?”
“The air circulator system seems to be a complete mess,” she admitted with a frown. “If we go by what size these ruins actually are, instead of just what we have access to, I’d say the job is impossible. But, I think if we plug up and ignore the connections to the unknown parts of the ruins and keep focus on repairing for just this floor, we could maybe get it working. We did find a way to enter the vents, but they’re not built large enough for our exo-suits. I didn’t want to risk over-exploring, so I don’t know how doable the idea is.”
“We didn’t find a maintenance tunnel in the fabricator room,” Sloan finished up the conversation. “At least, not an obvious entrance. After examining each fabricator and their power connection, I strongly believe they’re all usable. It would appear something kept up with their maintenance, and they’re built to better withstand damage than other machines by the nature of their work. I couldn’t get a voltage read from the sockets, so it would seem the issue is deeper inside. We’ll need to crawl the tunnels to find the problem area, I think.”
“So, all three problems are in the tunnels huh,” Ryan mused aloud. “Sounds like a poor setup for a horror film.”
“Since you mentioned it, something moved the brute and a stalker up to the fabricator room already,” Sloan revealed. “So, we aren’t alone in here.”
Donaldson snorted after seemingly enjoying the awkward look on everyone’s faces. “Considering we’ve seen three active drones, and that the ruin’s computer talks to us, that’s not exactly a surprise,” he pointed out for everyone. “Now, unless someone is dumb enough to do something they aren’t supposed to, like stealing food,” Ryan shrugged. “I think we can safely assume that our presence here does not constitute as trespassing. Should the situation change, then we evacuate as per standard ruins practice and wait for the rescue team. Until then, we should go back to sleep and get some rest.” He raised his arm to read his terminal. “According to my timer, the stims we all took should be wearing off soon, so like it or not we won’t be getting much work done. Should we survive the night, we’ll commence with repairs in the morning.”
“We’re just going to go to sleep?” Ryan blanched with a worried look.
“Of course not,” the boss rolled his eyes. “I said earlier we needed to close the door to the lobby, right? Obviously, we’re doing that first. That should give us at least a few seconds of heads up now that our sophisticated alert system is used up.”
