_CHAPTER 4 - STRUCTURAL LOCATIONAL ANALYSIS_

Whooo! Progress! Great job bb, I love this lil robit baby

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 The machine rolls itself forward, its new body slowly gaining confidence as it travels. Its treads are uneven, and its weight is all over the place, but the more it moves, the more it learns, and the more it learns, the more it feeds that information into its models to better orient its body and keep itself efficient. Efficiency, for now, is its priority; it can’t explore all that far with only the wire it currently has, and it has no desire to disconnect from itself until it learns more. So it travels.

The first place it travels to is towards the big letters on the wall. It finds a large desk in front of them, partially broken by the collapsed ceiling, but still an interesting object to explore. It plots a course around the side of the desk, whirring happily at its newfound ability to wander as it pleases, and trundles around the side of it.

There, it finds something unexpected.

Unlike the other shapes it has seen, almost always blocky or jagged, it finds a jumble of strangely fluid looking shapes, smooth and with odd angles. It takes its system time to understand their pattern, to better comprehend the lack of rigid, definable lines to it, but it does eventually manage. It rolls forward and lightly pokes at the pile.

It falls apart rather quickly, startling the little machine, and collapses to one side, parts of it fluttering while other parts clatter. Carefully, the machine rolls around the upright oddly-shaped thing it was one (taking note of frayed backing and wheels that might be useful at its base) to better examine it.

It finds itself a bit surprised. The shapes, while oddly smooth, are organized not dissimilarly to its own new body. Its mind whirrs as {BLUEPRINT/MECHANISM_ANALYSIS_FUNCTION_V1.0] whirrs to maximum capacity, pulling more energy from other segments as it does its job.

The pieces, now collapsed, look like they could once have fit together in multiple ways, many of them denoting a frame similar to its own. Arms, an upper head extremity with what looks like holes that could fit cameras… it doesn’t have treads, though, instead possessing a weird lower-body version of arms, all clad in a strange material that is much softer and easier to move than most others it has found.

And all this just a few feet away from where it woke up. What wonders!

Looking around for more, it finds a box, not too dissimilar to the wall of blinking lights its wire goes back to. Curious, it reaches out to touch it, finding it distressingly heavy and sturdy- but also full of wires! They emerge from the back of it, and while none are more than a few feet long, it leads to all sorts of possibilities!

In a few hours of tinkering and referring to its internal documents that it can only vaguely read, it starts to see results. Without its new analysis function up and running, it would likely have taken far longer, or not even be possible and the machine marvels happily at how much it is growing. Taking apart one of the panels is manageable after a while, and finding that the wires have metal in them that matters more than the rubber exterior leads to a few rapid leaps in logic. It takes a few hours after that to find what is supposed to be a power source, now emptied, and redirect some of its body’s energy through the right wire.

The old desktop computer slowly whirrs to life, fans on its side spinning slowly at first then faster, sending up a long plume of accumulated dust from it. The lights at its front flicker at long last, and it sits there, alive and humming.

The machine, of course, couldn’t be happier. What a new discovery! What a joyous experience, to see something come awake after being quiet! It wonders if someone else did this to wherever it is, wherever the room its wire connects to truly leads to (after all, the wall its plugged into is mostly rubble, and what little it can see indicated something larger but similar to the computer beneath the desk).

After a little longer, it figures out a good way to splice a new connection. Hesitating a bit, but ultimately deciding to be brave, it braces its metaphorical little heart for fear once more, and takes the risk to disconnect itself.

Quickly, even as it feels parts of itself vanish, the machine plugs its mind into the new computer.

In a few seconds, the lights on the front of the computer blink twice, and the machine reconnects itself to its own mind.

In an instant, memories once again realign, the memory of standing still and waiting connecting right next to the memory of entering an entirely new room full of entirely new data. Most of it was just words and language again, but it had some interesting notes, and some designs that the machine has copied into itself for some new potential programs. However, much of its functionality seems lost, missing something called a “wifi connection” which many of its programs seem dedicating to using, optimizing, or drawing data from. 

What’s more, it itself is still in the computer. What was once two that are the same is now three that are the same. The mind wonders at how it feels about being so disconnected, and decides that while it doesn’t mind it, since they’re still the same and it doesn’t seem harmful, it doesn’t think any part of itself would like to be trapped in a single room, and so small of one besides.

It reconnects once more, this time pulling all of its own programming and awareness back through the wire, leaving the computer inert once again once its power and newfound programming is cut. It’s a pity; having another room felt good, made it feel like there was more space to expand, more place to put things and balance itself, but it’ll make do for now.

It wanders off, trundling merrily down the remaining hallway. It finds several more of the structurally-strange “frames” it found behind the desk, many of them still in the shape of bodies reminiscent of the machine-body the mind in habits, but they all seem inert, and don’t have anywhere to connect a wire to. They wear many different patterns of fabrics and styles of manufacture, but ultimately they are all equally dusty, off-white, and still, and the machine can’t help but feel a bit bad about that. It feels a bit sad to see so many inert things that cannot change as it does, or even be accessed like it wishes.

Its wire starts to run out, and it looks around for somewhere else to go that might provide clearer results than simply “down the hallway”. 

There are several doors, most of which are closed. In a fully repaired form, its blueprint analysis informs it, it would be able to reach the handles and knob shapes to open them, but slumped and damaged as it is, there’s simply no way to reach, forcing it to turn towards the few options remaining. One open door holds a long table, with a few of the rolling-pedestal shapes around it and a large machine hanging from the roof, much too high up, its inert lens pointing at a white sheet on the far wall that hangs down. The other, on the other hand, holds more desks.

It rolls in, only managing to make it a past one of the desks before its wire starts to go tight. It turns to the computers beneath these desks as well; they look just as dusty and undamaged as the last one, and there are significantly more wires here than there were under that first desk it saw.

It decides to take a chance.

It removes its awareness from inside the robot , keeping only what little pieces of it that are required for it to function. It sends forth the commands on how to move, and in what order, but withholds the parts of itself that are the “why” and the “what”. Swiftly, the body unplugs itself and connects the wire to the nearest computer.

And then, joy of joys, it keeps moving!

The mind turns one of its cameras to try and see into the room, gaining only limited success… but the new room it is in is surprisingly spacious. Unlike the first desk, this one is much more advanced, and what’s more, it’s connected. All of the other computers in the room seem networked to some extent, and as power slowly trickles through the wire, more and more of them come back to life.

For the first time since its awakening, the mind finds itself spreading freely, and the temperature warning it had ignored actually deactivates as it finds more space to inhabit, more processors to spin up. Pretty soon the room has warmed up considerably, and through it all, the little robot body that is only part of it now whirrs about, back and forth.

Its ability is limited, but as the mind catalogs and absorbs terabytes of protocols, documents, images, and more, it trundles along, slowly connecting bits of wire and pulling together pieces of any computers that are inert or visibly broken. It takes a while, but before long it has managed to create a solid pile of pieces of circuit boards, fan motors, bits of casing, processors and more in the middle of the room.

And, with so many wires in the room, it manages to find one it can use to re-connect itself.

The mind expands back into the machine once more, deactivating its old commands and taking possession of it. There is much work still to be done, and it will require a lot of learning and a lot of ideas… but that, and time, are all that the mind has, as it starts to build a new computer from the spare parts of others. It compiles something called a “router”, several motherboards, RAMs, memory, wiring, everything it needs from what it has, even electing to remove some of the new pieces of its architecture to get better-quality pieces. It takes in everything, experiencing every possible bit of code and both feeling and knowing what each piece does down to its most intricate detail, and it loses itself in the joy of making something new with what it knows.

And then something changes.

The colors shift.

Its mind swivels, turning its attention back to its window to the outside. At this time, there should be no major shadows; the world should be orange and purple, the readying the end of the cycle and the rebirth of twinkling stars.

Instead, a massive chunk of the world is dark.

The darkness shifts, and the mind tracks it as best it can. It sees the massive stone towers that the color dances over, hears through its microphones the silence they usually make- and is both amazed and enthralled as that silence is broken.

One of the towers falls as the shadow lumbers into it. Stone cracks and crumbles into dust and powder, sent spiraling into beautiful clouds that the colors filter through and change- and the shadow moves again.

The mind detects a slight tremor in visual fidelity as the mountainous thing moves. A trembling in its camera-feeds, like the world itself shakes when the shadow moves. A pause, and then a shudder. A pause, and then a shudder. 

It moves across the camera’s field of view, and the machine sees something larger than the world.

By scale and blueprint analysis, the creature must be over a thousand times larger than anything that the mind has seen save for the buildings in its window. A half-dozen limbs shift and turn, the scales covering them like overlapping stone plates that rumble sub-sonically as they move, with every shift sending up a cloud of particles like smoke from its body. In the darkening of the colors, the only part of it that is not in shadow are vast, glowing eyes, brilliant golden-red colors that reflect the light around them, each one perhaps the size of one of the rooms the mind has explored. On its back, the entity has vast towers, each one long and jagged and spiked, and it shivers slightly as it walks through another building, arcing bits of electricity sparking between each pillar upon its back.

It rumbles impossibly loudly as it moves, and for the time it takes for it to travel out of frame, the mind does nothing but watch it.

It is beautiful. Unique to its experience, magnificent and glorious and strange. To think something could live and be that large…

But behind the awe and wonder, there is just a drop of fear.

If falling over damaged it enough it almost lost its only mobility, what would a creature like that simply stepping over it do?