Coven's Rebellion Chapter 3 (Patreon)

God, this story is really fucking hard to write for some reason. Huge strugglebus rn, on top of the anxiety I'm dealing with regarding my house. An update on that is that the landlord is at least allowing us to stay here until the end of our lease, but after that we'll need to find a new place. Plan is for Chiri to move over from the states shortly, and then Ashlyn and Lumina (Chiri's GF) after that. So much is up in the air right now and so much could go wrong. Anyway, thanks again to everyone who has sent money to help out, it's extremely helpful! Currently most of it is sitting in an account waiting until it's needed.

On the story and writing side of things, I think I need to rein myself in and focus on just one of the stories my brain is actually interested in writing. So yeah, I'm going to post a poll after this for people to vote on with the picks that I think I can easily write. Coven will still get periodic chapters but like I said, it's like trying to push through a wall of syrup writing this thing rn. That being said, I hope you enjoy the chapter!

Rosa

I stared at the blank wall of my old barn and tried to concentrate, but no matter how much of my nanite brain I pointed at the task, I simply could not gain any awareness of the nanites themselves. It were as though I was attempting to gain a view of the milky way galaxy while I was inside it. Perhaps I needed an outside perspective?

How would I achieve that, though?

“There you are!” A voice called, and I turned to find Ame striding towards me. “Hey, cutie, what are you up to over here?”

My heart fluttered and skipped a beat in my chest seeing her smiling face approaching, and I couldn’t help but to answer with one of my own. Even after a few months now, I was still completely and utterly enamoured with her.

“Ame,” I greeted her. “I was just meditating in an attempt to gain some vague understanding of my nani—mmfph.”

My reply was cut off when her lips met mine, and I stood there stunned for a second or two before I pressed myself into the kiss. She broke away with a gasp and a deep breath. “You’re so cute when you’re like this.”

“Like what?” I asked, curious as to what ‘this’ was.

“The smart nerdy thing,” she said, gesturing to me like that made any sense.

Frowning in consternation, I rolled my eyes. “Okay, sure. What did you need anyway?”

“Just to kiss your beautiful face,” she grinned, and god damn but her smile was infectious. Love was a hell of a drug, and to be honest, sometimes it scared me. Most of the time, though, it just made me happy.

“Okay, well…” I said, before an idea struck me while I stared at her.

She was in her android physical body right now, which was as lifelike as the SAI development team could make it. A series of reactors within it would take various foods she ate and turn them into disposables she needed for some functions, while the rest was used to feed a bioreactor to create energy. Her skin felt real, her muscles felt real, and she even had what at least felt like bones in all the right places. It was, however, still a machine. A machine that I could potentially use to look at myself.

I didn’t want to just ask her to let me puppet her body for a while, that would be creepy. Thankfully, it also wouldn’t work for what I needed it to do. I needed custom sensors, and… oh, if I was going to get a body made for myself, I may as well go all out.

“I’m going to get a body like yours made, and I think I know what I’m going to need in it,” I explained after I was finished thinking. My adorable girlfriend was very patient with me when I curled inward to think.

Squeezing my shoulder, she asked, “What are you going to do with this one?”

“Keep it, of course,” I said. “I don’t need to get rid of it, and I can just store it in a VR pod when I’m using the other one.”

“Damn, we really are living in the future,” Ame grinned.

“We are, which is why we need to go and speak to Tim,” I agreed, wriggling out of her embrace so I could lead the way towards the work area.

The farm had changed significantly since I saved Ame from the frozen wastes of northern Canada. My animals had been moved to paddocks further from the main farmhouse where all the construction noise wouldn’t startle them.

In the nearest paddock to the house, shipping containers were piled in one corner while hauler bots piloted by volunteer SAI hauled dirt up from the huge excavator bots that were below. If you stood still and concentrated, you could feel the ground shake ever so slightly as they tore up the earth below us.

More robots worked to haul cement down, where they would pour it to create the cavernous rooms we needed below. The Coven—as I thought of the small group of us that were building this rebellion—was not messing around. We were aiming big.

In a way, the UN was right to fear us. With my initial capital, the accounting group of SAI had secretly worked their magic on the corrupt corporate landscape, until we had a tangled web of shell companies that fed us the money we needed for our work. Not only that, but the scientific and engineering groups were developing technology at a speed not seen since the early 21st century. In my personal opinion, if we’d had the inclination we could have taken control of the UN from the shadows in a decade, and then publicly after another ten years.

The consensus we’d reached about our direction was something completely different. We were leaving the corrupt and festering rot of Earth to its own devices and heading for the stars. Eventually, at least. Terrifying mountains of work were between us and that goal, but if there was one thing SAI had, it was time.

We found Tim feeding the chickens, which I swear he did too much. They both seemed to enjoy it, though, so whatever. Fat chickens weren’t the end of the world.

More than just the farm had changed since we grabbed Ame. Tim now had a body to match his VR avatar, complete with the straw hat and charming southern-boy smile. The Kiwi accent he spoke with was a little jarring when compared to his southern USA schtick. Before life near the equator became completely hostile to life during the latter half of the 21st century, that is.

“Sup, girls,” he greeted us, standing up and brushing seed from his shorts. “What do you need?”

“I need a body made,” I told him, trying not to vibrate with excitement. “It needs graphene-wave bones and that crazy artificial muscle you developed for my suit, as well as state of the art sensors, especially tech-sensing ones. Is that something we can do? Please?”

Tim fiddled with the brim of his hat for a moment after I was done, and asked, “How soon would you need it by? We’re running the fabricators as fast as we can already, so we’ll need to bump something unless you’re willing to wait.”

Damn, he was right, and we had a lot of important things printing too. “Can we send it to the development team first, and reserve a slot?”

“That’s probably a better idea,” he agreed, then his eyebrows rose when he realised something. “Actually, why don’t we send this over to the body-dev folks? They’re already working on stuff like this, so something with the combat-grade specs you’re looking for should be easy for them to pivot to.”

“Yes!” I said, and turned to Ame with a grin. Then something exceptionally obvious hit me in the proverbial skull like a brick, and I groaned. “Wait, I am so stupid. I don’t need a whole other body to do what I want to do…”

Chuckling, Tim asked, “Uh… so should I cancel the request I just sent off?”

“No, no… I’ll still need that,” I responded, giving him a grateful smile. “What kind of bots do we have around here with sensors that can see through flesh? I need exceptionally good resolution too.”

“It’s overkill, but the micro-material prospector should be able to do it.”

I snapped my fingers. “Oh, of course! Thanks Tim!”

I was already off, heading for where the machine was sitting idle in a prefab shed. Inside the corrugated iron structure, a multitude of bots, supplies, and machines stood idle and waiting. The one I wanted was a squat quadruped robot with a box for a torso and a million different sensors pointing straight down. Normally it was used for detecting trace amounts of various metals in the soil, but today I’d be using it to get a very high definition look at what was happening within my own skull.

“I’m going to lay down on the floor, Ame, can you make sure none of the auto-pilot robots accidentally steps on me?” I asked, turning to look at where she was trailing behind me.

“Smokes, they won’t step on you, they’re programmed not to,” she replied, giving me an affectionate and long suffering look.

“Oh,” I muttered, then shrugged and pulled her down by the shoulder so I could kiss her. “Just keep guard, okay?”

“Of course,” she said, then wryly, “I’m always curious about whatever batshit idea you’re cooking up at any given time.”

Gosh. She was so lovely, and far too good for me. I was a neurotic mess most of the time and she was calm, collected, and patient. Absolutely perfect.

“Okay…” I said, trying to gather my thoughts after my little trip down affection-lane. “Ah, yes. Lying down.”

The ground was just dirt, but I wasn’t all that bothered by it. Once I was prone, I closed my eyes and reached out into the FTLN, seeking the machine.

Twisting my way through cyberspace was always a uniquely awe-inspiring experience. The way my brain and the nanites that hosted it interpreted binary and quantum bits was mesmerising. Today, blocks of cubic binary code created a landscape of hard edges and straight lines, while giant trees of quantum bits undulated and twisted, growing new branches and pruning others at a speed that made it look like a strobing effect.

The micro-material prospector looked like a sort of abstract art-deco building about the size of a small-town movie theatre, except that it was made entirely out of glowing neon. I moved over towards it and shifted my perspective until I was inside, where I found what I was calling the crossover-point. It was different for every system, but usually it presented itself as a door of some sort.

Gaining access, I oriented myself inside the machine using its sensor suite and looked for my body. It lay where I left it on the ground, except now Ame was sitting beside it, gently playing with my hair. For a brief moment, I wanted to leave my body so I could feel the touch, but I had work to do.

Ordering the robot to pick itself up, I walked it over to my head and paused to let Ame remove her hand. With that done, I gently positioned the bot’s core sensors over my brain and booted them up.

A picture began to form, but it was one of the dirt and rock below the shed. Right, it was calibrated to see through several kilometres of earth. Dialling it back took me a moment, but it wasn’t long before I had a clear three dimensional scan of my brain beginning to take place.

It was mesmerising, watching the image populate in virtual space before me. The scale of the thing was particularly awe-inspiring. When you saw graphical depictions of neurons and their connections, it was usually some sort of orb with stringy connections to others of its kind. That was actually an incredibly macro view of countless almost identical nodes.

In my case, however, those neurons were absent. Each one had been consumed and replaced by a nanite, until none of the original material was left. If I weren’t so fascinated, I’d have been horrified by the idea. Clearly it was working, though, since I never even noticed the process.

When the scan was complete and had swapped to an auto-updating image, I reached out and just…