Better Gardening 8 (Patreon)

Commissioned by Kejmur

Better Gardening

Chapter 8

-VB-

Designing a new guardian to act as my defensive transport was fun.

Elephants, I read, were animals with emotionally intelligent as well as conventionally intelligent creatures on par with humans. They weren’t on par with humans on all fields or even a close second, but it was close enough that on many worlds, they were protected under the same laws as humans. 

Historically speaking, people kept elephants as a status symbol because they were not only so hard to raise, train, and control compared to other animals but also because it cost enormous amounts of food and water to keep them alive and healthy. War elephants, as elephants trained for war were called, only happened in groups of dozens of war elephants at max. Any more than that and the state would be financially ruined by the burden. It was recorded that the famous African general “Hannibal” had tens of thousands of soldiers but only 37 war elephants. Once the times of spears, swords, and arrows were over, elephants only remained as status symbols and not animals of war. 

Elephants as wild animals lived in herds with a matriarch as their leader and traveled vast distances where they shaped and changed the environment as they existed. In jungles, elephants would cull tree growth and disperse tree seeds, unintentionally enlarging the forests where they resided while preventing the trees from covering too much of the canopy and kill off underbrush plant growth.

So how did I want to make an elephant my second guardian? 

Well, it would need to be built like a tank. Elephants are large animals that coud ignore attack that even modern firearms could unleash. A bolt of plasma will burn and hurt an elephant but it will kill a human. I wanted to build on that aspect of the elephant’s mass. I could weave nanofibers into the elephant skin as well as over and under it to provide exdermal, dermal, and subdermal meshes. With how thick an elephant’s skin was, this was possible and probably better way of protecting an elephant than just loading it up with plate armors. An elephant already moved fast but I wanted that speed higher and endurance longer. So maybe give it a second heart and give it biomechanical myomer fibers that wove around the existing muscles with DNA instructions on how to repair them naturally? 

Instead of tusks, why not machineguns?! It will be able to make more ammo from whatever it eats, though it will also mean that I’ll need to install a miniforge and nanofabricators. Then cooling will be a problem along with electricity for all non-biological processes. 

… Why not install a fusion reactor? Smallest fusion reactors came in palm-sized devices, after all, and while the output was limited, installing multiple of them should ensure that even if one failed due to one reason or another, my second guardian will be able to go on. 

I’ll even add microreflectors into the three skin armor weaves so that lasers will weaken. But that will make plasma attacks more dangerous because reflectors were often made out of heat sensitive materials. Would reactive energy shields be good enough? Personal energy shields were a thing but they were not flexible and needed to be turned on and off wholesale. Reactive energy shields were better because they, well, reacted, but they were also limited in area and arc.

… But an elephant should have enough mass to install multiple of those reactive shields, right? Reactive shields were bulkier than micro-fusion reactors but only needed a micro-fusion reactor to remain active for hours at a time. 

And if I run out of room, I can give the elephant some gigantification DNA to … 

Yeah, my second guardian will be the best. 

It will -.

---

“It’s a monster.”

He gawked at Mana. “Mana, how could you call her that?! She’s a sweetie!”

“Sweetie, my binary ass,” Mana grunted in a very un-feminine manner. “Elephants are supposed to be, at max, 3.5 meters tall. Your guardian over there is 6 meters tall.”

Mana continued to stare at the monstrosity that Administrator Dulent had created with the modification chamber. She didn’t know what he did, but he had bioengineered an elephant into a near perfect war machine. Even her passive scans were telling her that nothing short of a heavy munitions squadron will put a dent on that thing. If she faced one of those as a boarder on her station, then she would have just vent the entire section and fuck the friendly casualties. Those muscles and physical defensiveness will allow it to ram through station walls that were less than bulkheads, shrug off artillery fire during its charge, and throw light battlemechs with a swing of its trunk.

And those tusk-guns and ammo reloader. It will literally never run out of ammunition. On a standard battlefield, it will devour machines to shoot regular bullets but in environments where there were only organic enemies, it will shoot concrete-breaking bone bullets. Bone bullets that were as big as the average human fist. 

If that wasn’t all, then it could generate military-grade reactive shields.

The entire animal was a violation of some of the highest laws regarding animal modification.

But … could she afford to get him to remake it? The administrator did face a battle up ahead with the enemies he’s made already… and more with enemies he will surely make. It was indeed a formidable beast… that had taken quite a bit of the station’s resources to make. 

‘I will simply not report it as is,’ she thought as she adjusted the report she had been about to make to make the second guardian look tamer than it was. And if there was someone high enough in the government connected to the illegal orgs who read her report?

Well, they would get a very rude awakening.

“... What was it that you said, administrator? I’m afraid I didn’t catch that.”

Daniel huffed at her. “I said I chose her name.”

“Her?” she asked. 

“Yeah, her. Because elephants are matriarchal, right?”

“They are.”

“Yeah, so her. Her name is Umma.”

“... ‘mother’ in Korean.”

He looked shocked. “Huh? How’d you find out so quickly?”

She raised her digital eyebrow. “I am an AI, administrator,” she spoke slowly as if she was talking to a five year old. He obviously understood her condescending tone and speech because he glared half-heartedly at her. She chortled at the childishness of her administrator.

… She hoped that he wouldn’t change much even after he got his memory back.

She really did hope that.