Kick the Sphere 21 (Patreon)

Kick the Sphere

Chapter 21

-VB-

My reason for ordering a raid upon the Capellan Confederation was fivefold.

One, hurting the Free Worlds League wouldn’t help me in the long run while the Capellan Confederation with its incessant need to standardize and brainwash the masses would definitely want to hurt me. Hitting their biggest manufacturing center will definitely hurt them as the expedition fleet I gave Catherine (Kar98k),

Two, Catherine wanted something to do and this was my way of giving her a purpose in her new life. She was, unfortunately, the kind of programmed individual who was stuck in their loop of life: a soldier who cannot leave the battlefield.

Three,  this was a show of force that the rest of the Inner Sphere cannot ignore. I sent Catherine with three warships that didn’t exist anywhere else in the Inner Sphere except in the hands of the ComStar that did not want to reveal their hands to the other players of the game. Showing even one warship would have been enough to have the Successors wary about engaging me militarily. Three? It probably straddled me between “too dangerous to fuck with” and “too dangerous to let live.” Of course, no one would know until it was too late that I already had over two dozen such ships and more on the way. Dansur already possessed orbitals saturated with defense platforms with railguns capable of firing projectiles at 0.1% of the speed of light. Their ASF won’t be able to save them. No, everyone would be too focused on Betelgeuse and the warships parked there to focus on Dansur.

Four, by sending out a raid of my own, I was playing the other Successor Houses into thinking that, just maybe, I was in the same mindset as them. Whether they actually thought so or not was irrelevant. The purpose was to offer a chance that the illusion was real so as to muddle their options and path forward.

Lastly, it was definitely a test for my own technology. I didn’t send Catherine with just the warships; I sent enough replicators with her to wipe the entire system. However, was that truly the case? It was theoretically possible but was it pragmatically and practically? I needed those answers, and Catherine would get me them.

Besides, it was very unlikely that anyone would be able to recover samples of my tech, and even if they did, they wouldn’t be able to make use of it.

All of that was about the outside galaxy. Dansur itself underwent a change as I forced one upon it and its people. See, it became clear to most people on Dansur, especially as I had corvette-class patrols in and around the planet, that there was a new leader of Dansur, and they came to me for work.

The first thing I did? Set up farms. While food can be made with the Manufactory, it took away time I could use to build other things. Also, each individual food needed to be inputted with their blueprints… which I did not have. A simple “bread,” which was in and of itself a very general term for very different foods depending on regional and cultural influences, was a very complicated thing made out of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, sulfur, and a dozen other elements whose ratio are not properly identified or even known in most cases.

There are recipes, but recipes are not blueprints but an instruction manual.

The Manufactory needed blueprints to work, and while one could be made for most tools, it’s not so easy with food to the point where electric circuits in microchips would be easier to map out. Using a #2 pencil. If basic food like bread was that hard, then about what about complicated ones with more ingredients, multiple phases of matter, and more?

For a human, impossible.

For an AI, inefficient, time-consuming, unnecessary, and “why don’t you just make the thing with your own hands?”

Those weren’t my words. Those were the words of my first non-Tactical Doll artificial intelligence. Or should I call him a “gestalt consciousness?”

Because, umm, the replicators? Yeah, they kind of … ended up developing their own personalities.

Yes, them.

From the masses of replicators that weren’t ever recycled (because I didn’t think to), three minds emerged: Ares, Apollo, and Hermes.

Ares, a fiery ginger with a thick Slavic accent and a penchant for violence, liked to fight (duh) but also liked to host fights for regular people and occasionally morphed replicators into forms of mythological beasts for people to fight against, on foot or in mechs.

Apollo, a calm burly black man, liked the … ladies a lot. It must be the Californian talk thing he did. The AI got more games than I did. (Why did Apollo like sex? How did that even work? I never programmed that in. Huh?!) He, Apollo demanded to be called a he, liked making grand blueprints and had been essentially a pseudo-helper since his “ascension.” He was also the one who said “fuck breads.”

And lastly, Hermes. Just like his namesake, Hermes acted as a messenger but instead of between gods and humans, he acted as a messenger between myself and basically everyone else. He was also a papa’s boy, wanting to do whatever I told him to do for the sake of being told that he was a good boy. The less said about his insane plan to somehow breed lizards to make a Golden Retriever, the better.

All three of them had second-tier administrative access to replicators, which was only one step below myself and came into being due to irregularities and corruption in some of the programming.

I knew I fucked up somewhere.

Now, my initial response had been to think of ways to “reset” the three of them, so to speak, but I decided against that. For one, replicators were always loyal up until the moment that they were betrayed. Sure, one branch couldn’t be controlled easily and two others went humanoid and genocidal-ish.

But, there’s a but here, I had control over my replicators. See? No problem here. The three predecessors to my replicators? Their control mechanisms were missing or outright destroyed but I still had my control over them.

So …

Successfully failed or something?

Something like that.

-VB-

Ares grumbled.

It wasn’t Father’s fault that he came into existence after he sent Aunt Catherine to raid these “Capellans,” but it was his fault that Ares wasn’t being allowed to make war upon their neighboring “Free Worlds League.”

“You must be patient, brother.”

Ares glanced over at Hermes, the daddy’s boy that he was, though he didn’t physically need to; they talked through non-physical means, after all.

“Patience is no fun.”

Hermes smiled, the corners of his lips stretching just wide enough that no one could call it unnatural but Ares knew the creep was doing it on purpose. In Ares’s opinion, Hermes was the most fucked up of the three brothers, and it was for a good reason; Hermes rose up from corrupted recycling programming that was meant to convert finished goods into their raw components and those components into more replicators.

“Father is great. He made us, no?”

“Made us is stretching it…”

“But he still made us.”

“Yeah. So?”

“He is great, and our aunts all know this.”

Ares nodded. Of course, their aunts did, including their one fleshy aunt. No other human was capable of what Father did and continued to do. Even the humans acknowledged this, but a glance at the recordings Hermes managed to get of some of them and how they schemed to use Father for their own benefit…

Ugh.

“Just like the Schemers, there will be others out there in the stars who will want Father for their own purpose. The Battle of Orbit before our birth was exactly that, wasn’t it?”

“Motherfucker, get to the point.”

“War will come to us, whether Father wants it or not. And you will be there, ready and educated in ways of war. He will send you out to wash the stars of his enemies, and you will do so. Just enjoy the time before then as a … period of preparation.” The creepy bastard sneered at him. “Because, personally, I don’t think you’re ready.”

Emotion (illogical yet natural things) spiked and Ares slammed his hands into the table between them.

“The fuck did you say…?”

“No replicator warform designs of your own, unlike Ares,” Hermes sneered. “Unlike myself,” he added as a giant worm of chittering scales slid up from under the table and loosely curled around the slant-eyed humanoid replicator. “No warship designs of your own. No tactical or strategical considerations of your own.” Hermes paused before smiling. “My, aren’t you a useless baggag-?”

“GET THE FUCK OVER HERE, YOU PIECE OF SHI-!”

Both of them got scolded for heavily damaging the meeting room.

-VB-

A/N: things are starting to spin out of Alan’s control…