Chapter Six


    It took Damien and the android a full year to hash out all the details and finalize the design for his android production line. Once the magma deposits under the volcano were accessed and samples were analyzed, it was determined that the lava flows contained more than enough variety and quantity of the required raw elements in the slurry of molten minerals.


    With the previous surface survey scans detecting large deposits of aluminum in the region, Damien could finally feel the material burden for his production line greatly recede. The planet was just as rich in fossil fuel deposits, which waited to be drilled, tapped, and extracted. While the rainforest was a gracious provider of a rubber tree variant, that only needed cultivating.


    Damien’s initial farming initiative wasn’t one of high yield, but of stringent selective breeding, as well as collecting the various popular local crop variations. He also wanted to find, suitable cash crop analogues to cultivate and hopefully introduce, such as coco beans, coffee beans, tea trees, tobacco, or hemp. His future expansion goals, planned for building a conglomerate out of the regions’ farming community, and acting as a wholesale nursery and seed supplier.


    This idea came about after Damien sent out a contingent of aerial drones to perform reconnaissance research, on the current agricultural market of the region. The survey came back showing, zero organization or cooperation on this back water world. Even the planetary data-net, was underdeveloped, and poorly maintained and administered making it barely effective, and mostly utilized as a communication messaging service.


    Damien didn’t really find this all to surprising, as he had already discovered the world’s position in the galaxy, which was at the very outer edge of known space. It barely had a working government, which seemed content to provide just the barest presence of governmental oversight, mostly directed toward the facilitation and taxation as the transit authority over, on and off world travel.


    For the rest of the world, it was frontier justice, with everyone out for themselves, with a touch of dog-eat-dog competition, which made for a very undeveloped free market, that was proving disastrous for everyone living on the planet. It was the root cause for the majority of the planetary population currently surviving off of ration packs. It was a completely ridiculous scenario, where ration packs even were allowed to exist, with the current level of technology the galaxy had access too.


    What Damien desired for the most, was infrastructure and a workforce. Sadly, this desire was just a wishful dream, without any financial backing, local reputation, or even a legitimate identity, and at the end of the day, he simply needed to be patient and content. The android’s tireless efforts were already delivering an impressive and relentless systematic progress and was more than enough to see them through this initial start-up phase.


    Once the production line began producing androids, then the rest would swiftly follow to take care of itself. For now, however, Damien continued his simulation dives into “Way of Shadow” while refining and expanding the scope of the simulation. His hope was to fully reconstruct the entire earth, and perhaps the entire Sol system. He thought it would be interesting and fun to have a complete geo-political game board to interact with.


    Fortunately, time was the one thing he had in abundance, as he was no longer constrained by the short life span of organic life. His new potential longevity, was actually proving to be the most difficult aspect of his new existence to wrap his perspective around, as he still felt that old driving pressure to rush everything to completion, as if time were a fleeting commodity. He needed to stop thinking in terms of one year, or ten years, or even a hundred years, and start visualizing his place in the galaxy in the next millennium.


    In many ways, Damien felt like he was more of a symbiote like the “Marvel Villain: Venom”, while the android played the role of “Eddie Brock” as the host body. He also decided that the android deserved a name of its own, so assigned her the feminine designation, Vex.


    Along with the new name, Damien designed a personal NPC behavioral personality core matrix for Vex. For her voice, he used the “American actress: Scarlett Johansson”, as his inspiration, wanting to recapture that warm smoky seductive voice that always gave him warm tingles, every time he heard it.


    For her personality, Damien wanted to recapture that 1940’s style, passive-aggressive secretary vibe, intelligently self-confident while being sweetly indulgent, seductively ambiguous while being coy about it, all tinted with a coquettishly flirtatious and witty irreverence.


    “Hey Boss. You busy?”


    “What''s up Vex, you got something you want to share?”


    “Just reporting the completion of the “Mark II” platform, Boss.”


    “Oh. Thanks, let''s go take a look.”


    “Always happy to please you. Boss.”


    With the new personality in place, Vex needed a full Mark-II redesign to go along with it. Even though jumping the priority queue would delay the production line, Damien still pushed it forward. He began by utilizing the female “logistic officer” model for a base. Instead of the stock aluminum alloy frame and sub-dermal mesh armor, he utilized a titanium-gold alloy for added reinforced protection and strength. He also incorporated “Marvel Hero: The Wolverine” style retractable claw, weapon systems in both fore-arms and hands, to provide Vex, with a last resort hidden trump card.Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.


    As for cosmetic alterations, Damien fully incorporated all seven orifices, which other than allowed her to pass visibly as an organic, it also gave her full sexual capabilities. He even introduced a mechanically articulated flexible synthetic tongue, that could be fully manipulated like a tentacle and was only slightly longer than “The American musician: Gene Simmons” demon tongue. He also changed the hair color from silver to black and changed her eyes from luminous purple to a deeper midnight blue hue. His last was to design a full body etching onto the surface of her synthetic skin, which displayed a symmetrical full body silver geometric patterned tattoo, that beautifully but discreetly accentuated her feminine features and contours. Most of her internals, where left the same as Vex was fully utilizing “Reality X” based technologies.


    Damien couldn’t help but find the newly assembled, five-foot tall Vex, with a sporty gymnast body archetype, quite adorable. Her age was made to look late teens early twenties. The perfect age to be mature enough to enter the world, but na?ve enough not to know any better. His goal was to make her an alluring bait for honey trapping. Moving to the rear of the new model, he inserted his finger through the anus, and felt for the hidden mechanical release, for the model’s back panels.


    “Be gentle Boss. This body is still virgin.”


    “Relax Vex. I’d never dream of treating you as anything less than a lady.”


    “I’ll trust you this one time, Boss.”


    “Don’t worry. I’m a professional. I’m sure I can find your trigger spot.”


    “That’s what every man thinks, but it’s rarely ever proven to be true, Boss.”


    “Enough. Let me focus, so I can trigger your release.”


    The manual release was hidden in this manner as a security measure, with the location of the right spot designed to be difficult and hard to locate, as you needed to press against the inner lining in order to trigger the release. It was definitely not something that could simply be done by accident, but only through a deliberate act.


    Finaly finding the correct location, Damien depressed the release mechanism, triggering a mechanical sequence, as geometric seams formed covering the entirety of the android’s back. The control surfaces spread apart, granting access to the android’s inner workings. The android''s spine split vertically down the center, before systematically splitting apart, while pushing out the three core spherical housing sockets, and the six empty slots for the nanite colony nests. The three core receptacles were for what he liked to think of as the three hearts of their symbiotic union.


    The topmost upper socket, which was still vacant, is meant to house his Kyber crystal base “Sent-core” (Sentient Core). The central socket was already equipped and housing the “HIVE core”, which contains the android’s core processor and runs the main OS (Operating System). This left only the lower most socket, that was positioned just behind the naval, which was waiting for her “Reality X: Perpetual engine-core”, named as such simply because he couldn’t understand the principles behind the technology in order to call it by anything more definitive. He only knew it had something to do with a core made of a micro-dot of anti-matter, and that it could roughly generate energy for tens of thousands of years.


    The subterranean room they were currently inside, would be Damien’s private automated robotic vault slash closet, in the future. He designed it to allow him to safely and securely switch out his cores, which was his current goal, for coming here now. Having positioned the “Mark II” he only needed to place his “Mark I” in position and engage the automated system. However, there was yet to be an automated system, for now there was only a mechanical arm hanging from the ceiling, in which he could utilize via the Force to manipulate it to swap out his cores. His last act of prepping was to release his own back control surfaces, in order to reveal his own three cores, which for the already powered up “Mark I” model, it only needed a simple command.


    With the room fully prepped and ready, Damien gave the final activation initiation, that began the transfer sequence, which involved his temporary shutdown, so the transfer could take place. All though he lost all his cybernetic senses, he still retained his Force awareness in the world. This allowed him to utilize Force telekinesis, to manipulate and control of the mechanical arm hanging from the mount affixed to the ceiling. The mechanical arm was equipped with a three-prong articulating hand, specially designed to grasp the spherical shaped cores, as well as a central palm area that could directly connect with the outer housing of the nanite nest in order to engage the release mechanism.


    The process proceeded without any complications, and all nine transfers were completed, as Damien’s cybernetic Kyber crystal core, once again began the booting up sequence as it once again began receiving power.


    The “Mark II” was a whole foot and a half shorter in height, and was roughly three times heavier in overall weight, than the “Mark I”. Other than the lower vantage point, it felt mostly the same, as the added weight, was undetectable with her cybernetic enhanced mechanical anatomy. She still operated with the same level of fluid dexterity and flexibility.


    Though Vex was feminine and had the signature hour glass figure, which emphasized the hips, waste, and breasts. Her body was designed for action, and not seduction. This resulted in a balanced ratio, and as a result, her synthetic breasts were undersized, yet beautifully perky, with little to no unnecessary weight to be offset for balance or obstruct the range of her movement capabilities.


    It was at this point, where Damien realized his oversight, as he had not provided her “Mark II”, with any clothing. This was mostly due to, having all of their fabric, armor, and weapon manufacturing capabilities, located at the farm site. It wasn’t so much the fact, but that it highlighted his future potential need for planetary transportation. For the interval, he had been getting by, through utilizing a small delivery fleet of autonomous aerial drones.


    Still, this made Damien consider what type of future transport to design, with his initial thoughts split between “Marvel: Quin-jet" and “Halo: Pelican”. The difference was mostly in scale, as the “Quin-jet” was more suited for small squad type missions, whereas the “Pelican troopship”, was more suited for cargo transport and battlefield troop deployment. Perhaps it wasn’t a choice between the two but simply utilizing both. He could first produce the “Quin-Jet”, to start with.