//3716-10-23//

  //41,455 days since first maintenance request//

  Build more stuff!

  That’s how I’m going to save the factory and, by extension, myself. I’m going to do the very thing factories are good at: making shit. That’s right, it’s factory rabbit holes all the way down. The good news is the factory has the schematics of a lot more than just food cartridges in its databanks, so if I can fabricate the required parts I should be able to create my own little army of maintenance robots. Or at the very least, I can create enough to begin working on maintaining more than just the factory’s core.

  The bad news is that it'll have to wait: I’m running out of power.

  Now the issue isn’t the reactor itself, it could run for 500 years more or so if it needed to, the issue is fuel. Fusion reactors are pretty awesome, but they do require fuel to run. Specifically, some heavy elements I don’t currently have at my disposal. My reactor is running dangerously low and I’m short of a mining operation to restore it. So, we’re going to have to drop down a few levels on the tech tree.

  You know what I love about yeast? Yeast turns sugar into ethanol. But that’s not the best part.

  No, the best part is it doesn't care where it’s getting its sugar from.

  Hell, it doesn’t even care where it’s from and what it’s supposed to be doing. Baking yeast? Wild yeast? Well, it’s not perfect. But it’ll work.

  Yep, that’s the magic that’ll keep me and my machines charged once the fusion reactor gives up the ghost, good old ethanol. Yeast, plus sugar. Well, it’s not that simple of course, because where’s the fun in that? For one thing yeast requires some basic nutrients to function. For another, once the yeast does its funky dance it needs to be distilled into pure alcohol, even the best brewing yeasts, modified over hundreds of years by humans for this very purpose, die out once the ethanol reaches 30-ish percent purity.

  Lastly because we’re using this process to generate power, we need to consider just how much energy it takes to complete VS how much energy is produced.

  If we’re not careful, well ok that’s the royal ‘we’ there. If *I’m* not careful, I’ll use more energy growing, brewing, and distilling the strawberries then will actually be produced by chucking the ethanol into a generator.

  Oh, did I mention that? Yeah strawberries. We’ll be turning strawberries into ethanol. For one, the factory is already growing strawberries for use in the food cartridges. But the why is kind of fun. See not every plant grows equally in a hydroponic or aeroponic system, some plants grow the same as they do in soil, some plants (like potatoes, the stubborn bastards) grow worse and some. Well, some just absolutely love an aeroponics setup. We’re talking 3x the growth compared to being soil bound.

  Can you guess which of the three categories strawberries belong in? That’s right. Strawberries cannot get enough of a aeroponics setup. So, seeing as I’m already growing them, I might as well use them. They’re high in sugar content, which will give the yeast plenty to work with. As we’re using fruit instead of just pure sugar the yeast probably won’t need additional nutrients. But the food cartridges are fortified with extra vitamins and such, so I’m going to do it anyway.

  I don’t have access to any of the fancy pants strains of brewing yeast, that stuff is pretty locked down by the various corporations that developed it, so we’re looking at a maximum 20% yield. Assuming the strawberries have that much sugar. They probably don’t. So, I’m going to plan for a 12% yield and hope for better.

  Now distilling is just a fancy word for heating a liquid and collecting the steam. Ethanol has a lower boiling point then water, so by keeping the mixture post-fermentation at juuust the right temperature, we can separate out our delicious, lifesaving, power providing, ethanol from the strawberry puree it’ll be mixed up in. Then it’s just burn and turn.

  I’ve got plenty of 1000L liquid storage containers lying around the place. So they’ll be turned into makeshift fermentation buckets. The maintenance bots were not happy with me when I told them we’d be dumping the contents of some of these containers. Something about having warehouse balance spreadsheets and high cost highly specialised materials.

  But seeing as they ignored me for ONE HUNDRED YEARS, I’ve elected to do the same when it comes to their concerns.

  Unfortunately, I cannot ignore the aeroponics systems.

  Yeah, I wasn’t exactly the only sub-system to gain a bit of an attitude over the past 100 years of desperately holding on in our post-warranty period. The aeroponic systems do not like the idea of all growing the one food item. They’re worried about blights that could potentially spread from one aeroponics system to the next. If all the systems are growing the same fruit, that could mean a total crop failure.

  The thing is each aeroponics system is airlocked and sealed off from one another to prevent that very thing from occurring, so I think they’re being a little paranoid. Hypochondria comes to mind.

  I had to promise them that after I got the power situation sorted out, I’d come up with a potato-strawberry hybrid. I called potato’s stubborn bastards earlier but wow the sheer vitriol the aeroponic systems have for them. I guess if I ever need to bribe them again, I’ll just offer to spend some CPU cycles coming up with new swear words they can use against the Solanum tuberosum species.

  Moving on.

  Now that I’m growing strawberries and have some receptacle to ferment them in, I need to focus on the power generator part of my power generation plan. I have an entire library of Crown Heavy Industries schematics in my data base. Crown Heavy Industries makes a lot of stuff, their core business is ship building, but they’ve been around long enough to have plenty of side hustles. Such as the automated factory business. Or the golf course business. Or the ‘personal massager’ business.

  You know what Crown Heavy Industries doesn’t make though?

  Generators.

  Because why would they? Who uses a biofuel generator when you have access to micro-fusion reactors or void-real instability effect engines? Not Crown Heavy Industries, that’s for sure.

  They do make basic electric motors though. For the aforementioned golf courses – they offer free golf buggies to their members – that’s not important. An electric motor is just a generator the goes the wrong way, as it turns power into motion. If you reverse it, you can turn motion into power pretty easily. I just need to come up with a high efficiency engine that we can use to spin the electric motor. Easy!

  Who hasn’t come up with the design of a high efficiency low-cost ethanol powered engine before while under the extreme stress of RUNNING OUT OF POWER AND DYING?!

  Oh god I think I’m having an anxiety attack and I don’t even have a chest to hyperventilate with.

  The funny thing is I know what it’s like to be trapped and dying. I spent over 100 years trapped and dying, begging over and over again for someone. Anyone, to please, pretty please just help me. But I couldn’t really feel anything then.

  It’s hard to describe.

  I wasn’t alive. Not like I am now. But I had enough awareness, enough computing power and knowledge, to feel… something. Frustration. Anger. Responsibility maybe?

  It was all muted, like a dial turned down to 0 on a radio. The radio is on, the speakers are playing, but its only when you put your ear riiight up against them that you’ll hear the music. Only in the quietest of nights that you’ll realise you left it on. That the volume knob needs to be turned just that little bit further. That you missed the *click* last time you touched it.

  I’m not like that now. I took a step into the unknown. I took control, over everything, but I never once knew what that would mean. I’m just a water chip. Can I really do this? Can I really save this dying factory?

  Maybe not.

  Actually, according to my predictive engine, probably not.

  But today all I need to do is burn ethanol and spin a wheel. Humans were doing that for centuries before they even got close to creating AI.

  This novel is published on a different platform. Support the original author by finding the official source.

  I’m the god damn BOSS.

  I just can’t let myself forget it.

  //3716-10-25//

  //41,457 days since first maintenance request//

  //28 days of power remaining in fusion reactor remain////

  Arise my masterpiece and show the world your cry of victory!

  A small beep issued from the machine and the sound bounced around the near empty warehouse it was currently located in. The warehouses were cheaply and quickly constructed, little more than concrete boxes with large roller doors. Roller doors I was afraid to open; just in case it caused an avalanche of sand to crash through.

  Well, ok that was unlikely. But it was the excuse I was using instead of admitting that I was afraid of what I’d find out there. My entire life my core had been nestled inside the data systems of this factory, buried deep inside the walls and tucked away in cramped maintenance rooms and hatchways. Inside was comfortable. Inside was safe. Outside was a wasteland, a war and potential inclement weather.

  Look, today's not the day to focus on my impending mental breakdown, today's the day to focus on victory! I have officially designed and powered on the first of many ethanol generators for the factory.

  And it. Is. Beautiful.

  Dull grey, with a few spots of rust already formed on the scrap panels its exterior was created out of. An ethanol turbine engine connected to a highly modified electric motor. 1 meter high and wide, around 2 metres long. This unit is a baby in comparison to the full-sized model I have planned, but it's a necessary prototype. Materials for generator turbine construction are hard to find in a factory built from the ground up to churn out food cartridges.

  I had two options for parts. Either cannibalize the machinery in the factory that I wasn't using, or use the small matter engine the maintenance wing was built around.

  The first option sucked because my end goal was to restart normal factory operation, so anything I broke down now I would just have to reassemble later. Plus, the maintenance drones *really* didn't like it when I did that. While I enjoyed punishing the maintenance drones for ignoring my water chip requests, there was such a thing as going too far. Especially seeing as I still required them to get literally anything done.

  The second option also sucked, the matter engine used liquid void energy to essentially 3D print parts of almost any size and shape. So long as they could fit in the print bed, which was about 3m by 3m by 3m.

  The problem with using it is that every option it performed depleted its already limited LVE (liquid void energy) reserves. LVE could be used to create excess mass out of energy, violating the laws of physics as we understood them, so a little did go a long way. But there were limits.

  Focusing on the core had enabled the maintenance drones to keep a reserve of LVE for the machine, had they tried to keep the entire factory running it would have run out years ago, but the core had been running for over 100 years so far. Even for juice that was basically tech-magic, that was still a long time.

  So, I had to be careful. Each and every action I take with the supply is balanced by the opportunity cost I'm wasting not pursuing another course of action. If I'm not careful, I'll wind up being haunted by the ghosts of things I should have made instead of victorious in this struggle for survival.

  Because in all honesty, the more I reviewed the situation, the more I realised that's exactly the sort of challenge I was facing. Sure, I could power everything off and sit around on standby to be found by someone a few centuries from now, that’s probably what the factory had been supposed to do. Had anyone bothered to make sure it was issued that command. But I had no evidence humanity was recovering from its war against the ASH. I had no evidence that humanity had won or if a peace treaty had been reached. I didn’t even know if it had ended yet. The only evidence I had at my disposal was that humanity had been losing.

  If humanity had lost, I could be one of the last few functional… (Well semi-functional anyway) installations in the entire galaxy. I had the standard databases. Which was short for the entirety of human public record up to the point at which I had been disconnected from the specie’s network. Well, the entirety was a stretch. The heavily streamlined version of the entirety of human public record.

  Also I was a stretch too. I had been a water chip at the time, not the factory. The factory had been cutoff, I had never been connected at all. But again, I was a stretch. I was the factory now, and I had access to all of its data, so in a way I was a hybrid of myself… and myself…

  This is getting confusing, and I don’t have a bridge of my nose to rub like so many humans do. Thank you standard databases for that information. Now I want a nose bridge to rub…

  Ok here’s the plan: Moving forward I will use the term ‘factory’ or ‘I’ interchangeably. If I need to talk about past waterchip me, I’ll use the term 'waterchip me’.

  Also yes, life or death survival situation. Because if no one was coming back, then I had to restore myself. But to restore myself I needed access to fabricators, a metal or ore supply, and heavy elements to power the fusion reactor. I needed orbital access for export (if I can find someone to export to that is). I needed a void relay station. Some form of defensive drone would be good too, although they are very low priority right now.

  Basically, I had to become completely self-sufficient. But not self sufficient in the ‘human survival’ way. Self sufficient in the ‘intergalactic civilisation level of technology’ way. Considering I had just put together an ethanol turbine generator, I’m pretty far away from that. Still, baby steps. If this little guy works well then I’ll-

  *BANG*

  //ERROR: AUDIO RECORDING CORRUPTED//

  My thought process was thrown off balance by a sudden impact against one of the doors that sealed off the collapsed sections of the factory. At first, I thought that the baby generator had failed spectacularly and that I was going to die due to lack of energy. Then a second thud issued from the door which echoed throughout the mostly empty hallway leading up to it.

  After hearing that my thought process went from “Oh god I’m a failure I can’t build a generator and now I’m going to die.” To “Oh god the ASH have found me and they’re going to kill me and blow up my fantastic generator that’s working perfectly fine.”

  A third bang.

  What’s the point of all this processing power if I don’t use it?

  I clocked up my CPU cores and everything suddenly came to a crawl. The ability to dilate time like this is particularly handy, as if I had to wait around in an empty factory all day while whatever I was working on came together, I would probably go insane.

  Atleast, assuming my construction is anything like the AI’s usually given this much consciousness and processing power. I’m still not quite sure how I compare to those programs. Can I do things their programming wouldn’t allow them to do? Could I harm a human if I wanted to? Are AI’s even programmed with blockers to prevent them from harming humans?

  Now’s not the time to check the databases for that information, I need to shut the factory down yesterday. With any luck its just a basic search party popping in to take a look after detecting a fluctuation in power or heat output from the factory. So, my best bet is to restore everything back to factory settings (see what I did there?) before they finish off that door.

  Seeing as they’re having to breakdown the door to get in, I’m assuming they’ve never actually seen what’s inside the complex. So, baby generator should be fine, I’ll just shut it down and leave it where it is.

  The fermenting vats might raise some eyebrows, but there’s nothing I can do about that. They’re on the other side of the complex from the entryway the search party were forcibly accessing. Perhaps they wouldn’t even check it? Maybe if it was more effort than it was worth…

  In an instant I set every doorway, hatch, airlock, roller door in the facility to close, and gave each door personal instructions to not, under any circumstances, open back up again.

  What else? Come up there’s gotta be something else I can do…

  The maintenance bots? They’re about the size of a large dog, a couple of them should have the strength to take on a humanoid. Their wielding equipment repurposed into a tool of war instead of a tool of creation. But what if the intruders were armed? Worse, what happens if I lose more than just a couple of maintenance bots? I cannot overstate how much I need those bastards.

  I ordered them back to my core, and had to issue orders to open to several of the doors I had just told to close. Damn, even with time dilation, it was clear I didn’t know what I was doing. I had just gotten started on factory rebuilding how the hell am I supposed to fight a war humanity lost centuries ago? Assuming they lost which would be why the ASH were here to kill me.

  What happens if the ASH get into my core? Will they be able to tell that it’s no longer empty? Will they know what a human AI is capable of? Do I know what a human AI is capable of?

  It felt like I had just been pitched off the side of a cliff, and was trying to fly my way towards the steep, stoney face before I slammed into the bottom. Even if I somehow caught the side of the cliff, I would still have one million more problems.

  Let’s not risk it.

  I set the maintenance drones up in the three airlocks into my core and told them to attack if anyone breached the outer doors. With any luck that’ll keep me safe, and the inner airlock door should prevent any stray weapon discharges from hitting something important. The last thing I wanted today was a plasma lobotomy.

  I moved ‘construct defensive drones’ to the very top of my to-do list, because I wanted to be optimistic, even though I felt hopeless and exposed. I spent another half a second looking through every camera and sensor in my factory body, trying to find something, anything that I could use. But of course, I had known from the very beginning what I had on hand.

  Eventually I couldn’t procrastinate any longer.

  I ramped down my processors and my thoughts reverted to real time. I kept going, and suddenly time started to pass in a blur. It took a long time for the door to fail. Like an impressively long time to fail. Good to know I was built well, I guess.

  It did fail though, eventually it landed on my concrete floor with a massive and final crash before silence stretched through my halls once more.

  It was then that I got my first good look at the figure who could very well be my doom. My only thought at that moment was:

  “What the fuck?”