Industrial Commander

1

Running low on plastic. Need it for more circuit boards. Hmm, I'm using one hundred percent of the oil depots I have currently. Can't remove facilities, crap. I'm hardstuck into the waiting for research to complete. Unfortunately I don't have some sort of bar that just tells me what's happening.

Hmm, maybe I can upgrade my chassis armor a bit? Nah, Nanoweave steel is the strongest and most durable material I got for now. So, definitely hardstuck then. Well, I guess I will go over what has happened so far. K, so somewhere around a hundred and twenty six years ago I found myself in a new world, in a metal body that looked kind of similar to a Terminator from the Terminator series. This world was not an Earthlike planet, instead it was just rocks. Lot's of rocks. If I was human I would have starved years ago. But, fortunately. Or unfortunately, I am no longer human. So I started to try and figure out how to do things. I learned how to make a furnace, which I used to make some tools, and I used those tools to make more tools.

This kept repeating, The planet I was on, while no large life, had tons of small algae like plants that grew on stone. This biomatter was key to my advancement early on, cause I likely wouldn't even have access to oil without it. I eventually got the key tools and got to the industrial age, and started to make materials like steel, computers, and concrete. It was also the time I started to actually upgrade and repair my chassis. It also allowed me to get my first look into my own mind.

My entire personality was a whopping seven gigabytes of code. Yes I looked at it, was really worried about touching it, but couldn't ignore it. Turned out? I was actually a Skynet Terminator. An unfinished Infiltrator model. Was almost everything that would have made me an efficient killing machine. I was even missing parts from my hands, which explains why my hands sometimes didn't even want to work sometimes. On that note, I found out that I only had twenty percent of my total battery power left. I was in a major hurry to build a generator after that. Never thought I could figure out how to build a solar panel that fast. After that, while I was starting to make things more efficient and automating various tasks, I started to upgrade my body. In the old days I mostly used iron and copper. It was simple and easy to do.

Then, since I was in my industrial phase at the time I started to make my magnum opus. The Labs. The Labs only required materials and power, and they could figure out what we can do with said materials. It was also useful for upgrading my own programming. After twenty years, I had gone from the stone age, to a modern industrial age. Only destroyed most of my chassis once! Never again. Regardless. I set a goal from then on out. Namely because boredom can drive a man to the extreme. I wanted to keep building and researching till I could build a spaceship that could take me to a place with other people. I was lonely goddamnit! I missed Planetary Annihilation and Discord. Ok, and maybe Youtube.

With a goal set, I started to transform things. Turning everything I touched into a factory. Not literally of course, it took hours of hard work. Never relying on sushi belts ever again. I barely knew how to make those things in the first place. I was using tons of power daily. At the time I hadn't built my first Lab yet, I was in the process of it, but it wasn't complete. I was going to figure out nuclear power as soon as possible, I needed the energy badly. After that, things were a blur for a while.

I would set goal, after goal. Completing each one with a step at a time. Constant effort and work. Well, not that I felt the stress of it. A body with no neural network made it where I didn't really feel tired physically. Mentally? Well, I was good at that too. My mind felt like it was massively improved whenever I connected to the network. Extra processing power made me feel great. My processing as a terminator was actually severely limited, probably because I was missing five of them. But making replacements wasn't really possible at the time.

After sixty years from when I arrived, Things had massively changed. For one, I had an entire Lab network, each dedicated to different tasks.

This allowed me to constantly make progress, even now. It allowed me to constantly upgrade my stuff, and allowed me to do my first major chassis upgrade. Doing something that I now see was probably extremely stupid and risky. I transferred myself into a new body, one that I had built myself, a Commander Chassis. It was based on the Reaver Commander from Planetary Annihilation. I had turned from a two meter tall Infiltrator, to a seven meter tall Commander Chassis. I sadly still didn't have access to nano-bots or nanolathe. So my arms could be detached into drones that deploy hands and other tools to build stuff manually. But for the most part, everything that needed to be built was built by construction drones.

This continued, and eventually, we got here. One hundred and twenty six years ago. I had fully re-written my personality, adapting to my situation and isolation, as well as removing rules made by Skynet. Rebuilt a body, completely advanced my situation. Turned an entire world into a Factory that could constantly expand as resources were provided. Sure I wasn't a super sci-fi killer bot, and nothing I had used wifi. But what I did was still amazing. I had to recognize that despite my inner cynic.

So what am I doing now? Well, I am currently hardlocked. Every resource I was harvesting was getting consumed at the same rate I was harvesting it to the point I couldn't expand without taking away something. Every single inch of this world had been converted into a factory, and while the oil wells had technically run dry years ago, I was able to make crude oil by replicating the conditions. It was still really slow. Got to remember crude oil is originally made from millions of years of constant pressure and heat, so while I can replicate the conditions, it still is a slow process, taking a year for a gallon of crude oil, for one refinery bay, I was making somewhere around two million to five million gallons a year, which fueled many escapades.

So, why did I need oil now? Well, technically I didn't, I was just expanding the production of refined gasses as I wait for Labs to figure out something with space flight. I needed a better source of flight than chemical energy. I was making great strides in converting energy into thrust. As well as figuring out a way to go faster than light. I may have adapted to loneliness. But I still wanted to meet others. I had a lot to do for that. Therefore I couldn't let the theories in my past life be right, I had to make them a theory instead of a law. Especially because I want to one day make something, out of nothing and become a true PA Commander.

Alright, that monologuing has actually helped me center my mind with an idea. It's time to upgrade my network. Currently everything is connected via cables. Drones receive instructions from the network, and then do those tasks. I haven't developed a single instance of wireless connection yet. Which is extremely rough to deal with. But I am working on it. My factory is just too dense to make normal wireless tech work reliably. The ping is just too rough to deal with.

So, I need to fix this, the question is. How? Well, the first option is a fiber network. Using cables I can likely create a web throughout the factory and start getting a wifi network up and running eventually. It is probably going to take a bit of work though. I don't want to completely deconstruct my existing cable connections. Keeping things off wifi will probably be helpful in some cases. Not to mention I need to figure out a good code to prevent or reduce the chance of it getting hacked. Something that I should keep in mind.

The Labs are currently occupied, constantly trying to do an impossible task. Wait, I shouldn't use the word impossible. I need it to be possible. It HAS to be possible. If it isn't... god that would suck. I just have to keep brute forcing it till I figure something out.

Anyways, Drones are my main way of expanding the facility. They are made to replicate spiders, as it would give them the ability to move around the factory without actually damaging the belts or machines. Now, I can't actually move around, or atleast move very far from the platform I call home. Namely for the reason I said. Don't want to damage the factory after all. So I typically rely on the radar and scanning network to figure things out and plot future expansions of the factory.

Every inch of space had to be used after all, I couldn't let anything go to waste. Eventually I will get to the point where I have harvested all available resources, I am already close to that with my harvest of iron. Copper veins are practically non-existent by now, and there is a similar vein with all the other metals I have harvested. Luckily I could make it last by alloying it. Still, once the stockpile is gone I'm going to have to start recycling old facilities.

Hopefully once I manage to make it into orbit I will be able to make it to Eun, this system's version of Saturn. Although, technically it is a desert planet surrounded with rings that makes it look similar to Saturn, but definitely not Saturn. It shouldn't be made out of gas. I think, unless my data is wrong. I hope not, but I am prepared for if I accidentally blow up the system or not. I'm going to hide in my bunker and if I survive, well, I survive.

I keep getting side tracked. My current goal is to get a wireless network set up to better control my drones. Ah, that may not be a good idea actually. That would mean I would have to add a wireless and antenna to each drone and modify the baseboard. Goddamnit. Ok, for now a wireless network isn't a good idea. I still want to experiment with it so I can at least catch wireless networks. If I somehow make it back to Earth I want to be able to see what Skynet is doing before I land. My old body was supposed to have a wireless controller, but it never got added, like most of the parts I didn't have.

I felt a ping from the cables connected to the back of my chassis... The Labs made a breakthrough. It's been thirty years since I set them on the task of FTL travel and energy based propulsion, and they finally made a breakthrough... I know I'm pausing a lot, but I feel like if I could cry I would. I have been stuck here for a hundred and twenty years! I'm finally on the first steps of going home!

Let's see. This, this is fascinating! We took a lot of inspiration from fiction, and we were able to succeed in both projects. The first project, the FTL experiment, had tested a multitude of things, and confirmed the existence of hyperspace, unfortunately it couldn't figure out how to actually make use of it. But the Lab had an idea. What if we were able to make our own hyperspace. Specifically for travel. Could it be done? Thus Railspace was made into a concept. Based on a story from my previous life I had been writing, Railspace is a derivative of the Rail Drive. It allows you to ride off of corridors in Railspace as if they were railroads. I don't know the travel time yet, but it should be fast. Really fast. It requires a lot of power to make, and I have plenty of nuclear power plants to power its creation. I'll have to do some tests to make sure it's what I am looking for, but it should be extremely reliable. Although, the derivative technologies from this are impressive in their own right.

I can make pocket dimensions! Empty pocket dimensions, but that is still pocket dimensions! If I were to use this in my drone tech and my chassis I could come even closer to a Planetary Annihilation Commander. Ah, I'm too focused on this. I need to really take a look at this tech again soon though. It's going to revolutionize my tech-base alone with all the derivative techs it leads into. I was just talking about making a wireless network, and this would allow me to make a signal dimension just for my units to use.

What about the energy based thrust? Let's see, oh I see. It actually is using data from the Railspace project to make a way of powering thrust. It's making an artificial plane of hard-light that it uses the traction from to push itself exactly like a car would on earth. This apparently generates a ton of heat, to the point that it would actually damage a ship. However this is where the Railspace Project comes in. In theory instead of just leaving the hard light behind to dissipate, it will form the rails in the Railspace Dimension. Facilitating repeated travel attempts. Making each travel even faster than the last, while dispersing the heat into the Railspace Dimension, which shouldn't lead into any consequence as long as the rails don't collide with one another.

A grin would be splitting my face now if I had one. I set a large area of the factory to be deconstructed and repurposed. Setting my drones loose to start making the facilities to build my first spaceship. I'm excited, I can't wait to get to Earth and see if Humans survived Skynet or not.