《A Certain Cyborg's Journey Back to Civilization》


 Day 0

    ...itive shutdown in progress, administering stimulant A-153; Restoring partial backup;


    And with that I was aware again, aware of the multitude of system failures and alerts. Even though pain had long since been attenuated to the point of practically being shut down to preserve my ability to function. I queried my informatic systems but found only my local storage functional.Fat lot of good that¡¯s going to do for me. Lots of offloaded memories about family and friends. Even more encyclopedic knowledge. A few subordinate AI. Avenues of contacting help? Not so much. I couldn¡¯t see much as something had damaged my optics quite extensively. I tried moving and found that it wasn¡¯t much of an option, my synthetic spinal chord apparently having been one of the many failures.


    So I decided I was going to go into self-diagnostic/repair mode. I hate doing that, you never know how long it¡¯s going to take for your systems to repair and to what extent they could repair themselves, if at all. Not that I¡¯d done it more than once, a testament to how stable my life up until now had been. But given that I couldn¡¯t move, couldn¡¯t see and couldn¡¯t call for help, it was the only option available to me. It should kick in any second now, cognitive functions slowing down to a crawl, hell, it may have already started, the last time I did this was several hardware generations ago. Maybe they made it more seamless? Last time I remember it being a similar sensation to walking through a syrup of some kind, only for your mind. I realized this was a rather pointless line of thought, but then I also thought, what else am I going to do? I could read through the diagnostic readout but that would probably just make me depressed and might even interfere with the self-repair routines if I tried to self-direct them too much. And so I set up a few triggers for reactivation and turned my cognitive functions to the bare minimum, letting the resident AI hopefully wake me up once the repairs had progressed far enough for me to contact help or if that doesn¡¯t happen, move on my own.


    And just like that, I could see. I found myself in a bit of a crater in a forest. Where on the station could I find such an extensive forest? I of course knew the answer and that was that there wasn¡¯t one.


    Informatic web was still inaccessible and satellite location tracking was also unavailable. Unlikely that both systems¡¯ wireless functions would be beyond repair at the same time, given that the emergency informatics module was triple-redundant. I could only conclude something far outside the norm had happened. Before attempting to move about, I decided to review the diagnostic logs. They revealed that some kind of hack of unknown origin had cut off my cognitive functions a few days ago in objective time before the willing shutdown. Last memories being of myself taking a walk around the city.


    In any case, it had taken me a few months to self-regenerate and not all my systems had done so. Though I was surprised to find a lot of the more advanced Createk systems available at a decent functionality percentage. Something I did not remember having installed. Those things were Expensive with a capital E. I¡¯d love to take those out for a spin, but I had much more pressing matters to attend to.


    Looking around without moving, I could see a person. A young man, wielding a metal-tipped spear and clad in what looked like some kind of processed animal skins. He was looking at me with fear in his eyes.


    At this point a few hundred milliseconds had passed objective time, maybe 5 minutes subjective, as my subordinate AI had deemed the young man with his, albeit primitive, weapon a potential threat and thus amped my cognitive rate up by a reasonable proportion.


    While I had been in cognitive shutdown, some of the background AI had been analyzing the star patterns in the sky and I was informed I wasn¡¯t anywhere near earth. So some kind of teleportation breakthrough? As I couldn¡¯t sense anything I¡¯d classify as technology around me indicating a crash-landing. Besides, if that diagnostic report¡¯s chronology was accurate, I couldn¡¯t have possibly made it out of the solar system in the time given. Since I had access to my local storage, I knew that local area meshing was functional so I should¡¯ve been able to interface with anything and everything in my immediate vicinity. Including at least querying some basic info from the approaching man¡¯s implants. On further inspection, the young man didn¡¯t seem entirely human, bone structure and organs varying slightly as shown by the class II medical scanner I again didn¡¯t remember installing. I was starting to suspect that I wasn¡¯t supposed to have shrugged off that hack. Someone had poured some serious resources into my systems.


    Assuming the unlikely scenario that the male approaching me was a baseline humanoid, I should have all the time I need or want to think. So I queried my implant repository. I had always been heavily geared towards survivability, but this was just ridiculous. Besides what I remembered having (beyond the obvious like the various data linkups) like reinforced bones, biosynthetic muscles, some toxin removal systems, and a basic metabolic suite, a lot had been added.


    Photovoltaics in my mostly intact epidermis.


    Full metabolic suite. As long as I didn¡¯t lose bodily fluids and I had access to sufficient power, I shouldn¡¯t need any sustenance to maintain my wetware.


    That class II medical scanning suite. These things are practically magic. Everything from physiological data to some of the more disruptive mental health disorders as well as a whole set of external implant override keys were available to me. From everyone within a 15 meter radius. This couldn¡¯t have been legal¡­ This thing would¡¯ve allowed me to wreak so much havoc on the station. I could¡¯ve set almost anyone¡¯s metabolic suite to secrete any number of harmful or intoxicating chemicals with these override keys just to mention one thing that should¡¯ve made it illegal. Would¡¯ve been the life of the party though¡­


    Createk nanofabrication systems. Still only partially integrated, but otherwise operational. These are another indistinguishable from magic tech. Basically my very own nano-scale molecular manufacturing machinery. These need a lot of power to operate, but as long as you have the energy and the input materials, you can fabricate anything you have a more or less vague idea about as they usually come with a massive database of blueprints. Or more accurately an AI that understands matter on a molecular level and greatly eases the task of designing any given object. I couldn¡¯t query them further as apparently they were still in the integration phase like I mentioned earlier.


    Personal energy storage devices¡­ With these capacities, these things should take up most of the space in my frame. And they probably did, because this was as far as I could get with the queries. The rest were uninteresting, offline, or both.


    In any case, a few heartbeats had passed. I tried something a bit risky and called out to the man. Thinking: When was the last time I used something as primitive as audible speech?


    Something nonthreatening, ¡°Hi.¡±, I said at a reasonable volume. Amping down my cognitive processes to match his likely reaction times. He ¡°immediately¡± grabbed his spear more tightly. I didn¡¯t respond other than repeating the statement in what was hopefully an even less threatening tone. I didn¡¯t really know what I looked like at the moment, I did know I had on almost no clothing, my skin was ripped in parts. But if I was on some kind of backwater planet with some hitherto unknown race of aliens, I didn¡¯t think I could look very far outside of the norm or I¡¯d have some major trouble coming my way.


    I thought I¡¯d try raising my hands a bit, open palms facing towards the spear-wielding hunter.Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.


    This seemed to calm him down a bit, but he was still quite worked up. Some time passed while I made sure I was ready for a fight, not that it would be much of one if I was anywhere near fully functioning and the opponent was a baseline. The moment seemed to drag on forever, but finally the spearman relaxed enough to start trying his own first contact procedures, which mostly consisted of him speaking in a way completely unintelligible to myself. Though I did note that a subordinate AI was already hungrily devouring his speech looking for patterns.


    I listened for as long as he kept talking, but eventually it seemed to dawn on him that I was none the wiser for what he was trying to tell me. So he seemed to take the Tarzan approach, he pointed at himself, spoke a word which I could only assume was a name, rank, or other form of identification. I responded in kind with a similar gesture and gave him the name James back. We had a long session of back and forth like this, during which I directed most of my subordinate AI processing towards deciphering the language, and I was already understanding some simpler grammatical structures. Though I dared not let it show too much. After all, to a culture of baselines, a being capable of going from not understanding you to a child¡¯s level of proficiency in the span of a couple dozen minutes would be shocking to say the least.


    By now I had gotten up, the spearman still keeping his distance, but markedly more relaxed by this point. So I pantomimed, I tried to convey the idea of shelter and food, though I needed neither at the moment; the weather was rather pleasant and summery at the moment after all. But I did need some kind of stimulation, being out of the informatic web was a lot like having lost more than a couple limbs and senses. I was very much not used to this lack of stimulation, the sensation probably close to being called nauseous claustrophobia coupled with anxiety. I needed to get back to whatever passed for civilization here. I could (and already did) instruct the neural substrate to adapt to a lower stimulation level, but it still felt awful. Such adaptations weren¡¯t instant after all. Especially not when I wanted to conserve the more exotic building blocks consumed by my implants. Speaking of which, they were mostly rather low across the board, hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, other organic compounds I was fine on, those were recycled on a mostly closed loop anyway, but everything else was dangerously low.


    The young spearman seemed to contemplate for a while before giving me a kind of shrug and doing a gesture where he rolled his shoulder a bit, which I chose to translate as ¡°this way¡±. So I followed him and after a few dozen minutes objective time I saw some smoke rising in the distance, only a couple minutes subjective time as I had chosen to slow down most cognition by a large margin to preserve my sanity. The man not attempting any more communication as he walked behind me, having switched the formation to that at some point. I didn¡¯t mind. I, or at least the subordinate AI in charge of amping me up should danger come near, could still sense his position and a lot of other things too with that medical scanner. Why do those things have omnidirectional sensors anyway? I didn¡¯t feel like looking that particular gift horse in the mouth further than that passing thought though.


    We arrived at the village, and a village it was, not a city, definitely not a metropolis, but not a scattered set of dwellings either. Surrounded by wooden walls, the village really gave off a strange vibe. A lot of the peopleon the streets gave me and my entourage a wide berth. Just because I was a stranger or because I looked wrong, I couldn¡¯t tell.


    Eventually I was lead into a building with a large number of men armed similarly to the spearman who found me. Not that their weapon of choice was the same, just that nobody was carrying anything more advanced than steel or iron weaponry and aside from a smattering of people with chain mail, most were clad in leather armor. I got a lot of looks I could only describe as murderous and/or fearful. But a few faces were also showing marked curiosity. I waved at some of the more curious people.


    I was lead into a side-room, where I was greeted by a man in much more impressive garb. He asked me questions like ¡°Who are you?¡± and ¡°Where are you from?¡±, the usual thing a city guard would ask of a new face. I feigned ignorance though and shook my head. I pantomimed shelter and food again, my guide having left me alone with the better-clad individual and his guards. He raised his eyebrows and called said guide in and asked for a report.


    Much of the conversation went above my head, every sentence bolstering the AI working on translation though. I stayed calmthroughout and let them finish talking. The guard captain, as I had internally labeled him, looked rather confused by my standards. Apparently not quite sure what to do with an almost naked man with strange-looking wounds all around. He did, however, understand that before much else could be done, I¡¯d need to be able to speak the language, be fed and clothed¡­ That or just thrown into the brig I assumed.


    Limiting my vocabulary to things that I could¡¯ve reasonably assimilated, I conveyed rather clumsily to the person in charge that I would like to learn their language and that I would like some food. In reality it went something like ¡°want learn speak, listen men?¡± with a whole bunch of useless to me gestures thrown into the mix.


    I, at this moment, decided that these people were hardly a threat to me. I had, after all, time enough to write short stories in between strikes if I wanted to accelerate my thinking far enough. Even with no combat training, I could probably take down a large number of these guards before they took me down in turn. That said I worked on making a background process for integrating some of that encyclopedic knowledge on ancient fighting styles and more modern martial arts into active storage. This process lead to the conclusion that I¡¯d drop my dumb act in the very near future. At the very latest when the integration phase of the Createk implants had ended. At that point this world would be my oyster. For that to happen, I needed to improve my internal material stores however.


    It took the guard captain a long time to come to a conclusion, at least from my perspective. He gave some orders and pretty soon I was being guided around, first given some low quality clothes made from some plant fiber or another and showed to a kind of mess hall in a different building from the guard station I had been in. I felt a little bad about eating here, because these people clearly did not have very much to go around and I did¡¯nt exactly need it for my continued survival. While eating some decidedly less than delicious soup consisting mostly of starchy vegetables I had the good fortune to hear one of the guardsmen discuss getting a smith to repair his weapon, so I asked my guide if I could see the smith, still in gestures and simple language. He shrugged and did that rolling motion with his shoulder, apparently deeming speaking to me to be pointless.


    As soon we arrived at the smithy, I started looking for my chance. I quickly found what I was looking for, and while both heads were turned, I snuck a piece of slag into my mouth and swallowed. Not the most pleasant taste, nor did it go down very smooth, but my reinforced digestive system would hopefully disassemble it and I could accelerate the integration phase of my Createk implants. After I had done what I really came for, I tried to get permission to use the forge, but like I had expected the smith was less than pleased with some random guy he didn¡¯t know putzing around in his forge. The operation of which couldn¡¯t have come cheap at this level of civilization. I shrugged and bowed and left the forge. My guide looking pretty irritated for a bit but then a kind of ¡°What did I expect?¡± expression flashed onto his face followed by embarrassment.


    The guide led me back to the mess hall and I just sat there, soaking in the conversations. After a while I could understand most of what they were saying. A smile creeping on my face a few hours of objective time later as I noticed my material stores being replenished and just as quickly consumed again, more iron and much more silicon than I¡¯d need at the moment, but that slag had a surprising amount of impurities in it. Huzzah for low-tech metallurgy.


    My guide seemed perfectly willing to pass the time by just talking with other passing guardsmen and hunters, mostly about his appointment to be my guide. Questioning the leadership¡¯s decision to even let me inside the walls. Calling me an idiot when I¡¯m sitting right next to him. Oh well. Baselines, what are you going to do?


    Figuring I had gotten all I could out of sitting in the mess hall, I got up and asked the guy in that same broken language I had been using thus far if I could find a place to rest in. He obliged and showed me to a local inn. I of course didn¡¯t have any money to pay the innkeeper with, which I conveyed to him at which point he muttered something about wastes of money and paid the innkeeper for me. They didn¡¯t lead me to a room, but to a kind of stables area. I didn¡¯t exactly care though. I could shut down sensations so ¡°sleeping¡± on some hay would be just fine. I thanked the men and got on some hay, set myself up to outwardly simulate sleep and waited for my digestion to hopefully finish processing that slag.


    Come morning, I noticed thatmy skin had largely been repaired, but more importantly the integration for the Createk implants was done, I was itching to go out and try them.

 Bootstrap process

    Now that the Createk implants were fully operational and under my command, I could really see what all the hype was about. At least for me personally. Not really for the average civilian back home. Most of the solar system was what you would call a post-scarcity economy, but still some of the more intricate tech that couldn¡¯t (yet?) be mass-produced would need to be rationed out to an extent. Same as with real-estate. Not that it was a big problem, virtual spaces could be bigger on the inside after all. What¡¯s a few decades, centuries, or even millennia waiting around in a literal paradise of your own making for a slice of some prime real-estate? To be honest not that many people, percentage-wise, chose to have a presence in the physical world in any case.


    Nonetheless with a population in the trillions system-wide, and with most products so easily accessible, virtually or in base-reality, Createk implants weren¡¯t very sought after. This was both good and bad. Nobody could justify starting up a whole production line of the things because next to nobody wanted to be able to exchange energy and materials for tech anywhere and everywhere, the price in resource vouchers being about the same as making the thing yourself. After all, you not only got resource vouchers that needed to be spent within a certain period of time periodically, one also got resource vouchers for recycling old tech. The very same molecular fabrication technology having been in use in larger static installations for ages now, allowing perfect recycling and reforming of broken technology. Not that tech broke all that often, but accidents happen. The real innovation of Createk¡¯s work was the miniaturization and the somewhat lowered energy demands of the implantable version.


    These implants were the domain of the true pioneers, anyone wanting to go to the less inhabited zones of the solar system would want one. Same for anyone who wanted to join one of the generation ships a few people would put together every few decades. For the real extremophiles who were not recognizably human in anything but cognition it was the first thing they saved up their resource vouchers for.


    What¡¯s more, this particular model of implant had next to no safety overrides. Upon querying the implant, it made me aware of the fact that it wouldn¡¯t/couldn¡¯t make gray goo or anything else that self-replicated without a set finite goal. Nothing about it told me I couldn¡¯t kill every single living thing on this planet if I decided to make a micromachine plague. Terrifying, I¡¯d have to write some safety routines of my own later. As under control as my emotions were in this silicon substrate of mine, I could certainly foresee myself being stricken with grief or anger enough to do something foolish in the next few millennia. It would, after all, only take a few objective-time seconds to design something as simple but devastating as said plague. Less if I really wanted to literally sterilize this planet permanently.


    This line of thinking was more than a bit morbid, but highlighted the power I had to shape this world.


    First things first, I had to get out of town. They could most likely offer me a lot more in the long term, but in the short term I had all that I needed inside and around my bones. The minimum amount of manufacturing capacity to start extracting resources and building. The medical scanner couldn¡¯t help much with identifying where there was ore, but I could, after all, just start digging almost anywhere and I¡¯d eventually have enough resources to do what I wanted to do. This wasn¡¯t efficient, but I could always amp down cognition until the process was done. One of the first things I needed was a reliable source of power, modern photovoltaics being efficient, but not ¡°build a secret base on an alien planet by yourself in a reasonable amount of time¡± -efficient. Not at the scale of a single human skin anyway.


    So, the current plan was to bootstrap onto larger power supplies via photovoltaics. I¡¯d make a few primivite-ish solar panels, seeing as they require the least amount of truly exotic materials. I could make some wind turbines but those aren¡¯t exactly inconspicuous and they require large amounts of conductive metals and perhaps some rare earths. The reason I wasn¡¯t jumping straight to something like fusion power was the requirement of a rather large quantity of beryllium. Several kilos in any case for a smallish-scale reactor.The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.


    So I set out, I didn¡¯t see many people on the streets but the ones I did see seemed to treat me with much less apprehension now that I wasn¡¯t naked and covered in strange-looking wounds.


    Outside the gates first, a couple guardsmen hindered my path for a few minutes as I asked them to open said gates. A helpful bunch, as they did so without much fuss. Probably just happy to see me gone. Foolish mortals. If only you knew of my true power. I jokingly thought in passing, bringing a bit of a smile to my lips. Some levity should be allowed. I took the happy joking thought as a good sign of my substrate settling down, the silicon I ingested earlier helping with tuning myself down a bit.


    So I picked a direction, started walking, didn¡¯t stop, and tuned down my cognition. A few days of continuous travel later I deemed myself to be far enough away from civilization that I could start some small-scale construction experiments.


    I set up some AI processing to automate bootstrapping of an energy and material store underground. It would make a good deal of sense to build everything I could underground, so as to not rouse as much suspicion if some traveler did somehow come across my little base of operations. Not that I could build solar panels underground and expect them to do me any good.


    Mining would be done by a mixture of micromachines and more traditional shoveling. Micromachines would separate the valuable materials from what I was loosely calling ore, while some macro-scale machines would take care of the actual digging through massive amounts of soil part.


    After an embarrassingly long time, I had built a functioning, if small, prototype of what would be doing the main digging. A kind of boring machine, one end a drill-like contraption that would funnel the dirt inside itself, after which it would separate the wheat from the chaff so to speak. It would then compact the ¡°chaff¡± around the tunnel to reinforce it, it would still leave a line of earth and stone of varying thickness behind it. It would also, at least in the full scale model, also produce cubes of pure materials whenever it had enough of said material in its stores, calling for another simple automaton to come pick up the cubes and sort them elsewhere.


    All well and good. By now I had a decent-sized solar array, not much in terms of energy storage, so most activity happened during the day. I did keep pumping out more micromachines whenever energy and materials allowed.


    It was mostly automated anyway, so a few months passed this way, luckily nobody getting curious about the ominous rumbling or the strange shiny panels and the man standing mostly motionless among them for inhumanly long periods of time.


    To be perfectly honest I got insanely lucky with this location. That or this planet¡¯s composition is weird. Most materials were at the upper ranges of their prevalence distributions. What I mean by that is that if beryllium is generally found between 2-6 part per million in the crust, I was getting closer to 6 than 2 for most such matter. Of course were I to require a specific material like iron in industrial quantities this location would not do, but for my purposes this was just dandy.


    More time passed and I finally got to my initial goal, which was to build a small fusion reactor. This would increase my ability to process matter exponentially. Going from a few dozen kilowatts to five megawatts or so being a marked improvement.


    I could now hide my operation entirely. And so I did. The fusion plant about the size of an old truck with all its supporting infrastructure included. I dismantled the solar array and brought it down underground. Ahh, I no longer needed to sit out in the sun for most of the day in order to charge my personal energy storage. I had a proper wireless energy grid going inside the base. Honestly as long as nobody came in with masses of explosives and caught me unawares I could spend an indefinite amount of time down here.


    Curling up in a hole without even having anyone to properly talk to wasn¡¯t exactly my idea of a fun time though, so it was time to advance my plans.