Embers After Flames, Chapter 12.6 (Patreon)

12.6

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March 3, 50 years post Fires of Ibis.

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The next few weeks passed quickly. It was strange, since I had less to do than usual and I thought that would have made it seem slower.

Apparently not.

It took me a few days to finish hauling all of ALLMIND’s base up off of the ocean floor. A lot of it was gone, destroyed both by sabotage and the hostile environment that it had been exposed to, but I was able to recover some things of interest.

The manufacturing area, for example, had been entirely isolated and enclosed even inside of the pressure domes. That was no doubt a consequence of the sheer level of precision she had been requiring in production, a precision that could only be maintained by a complete clean room. Annoying to set up, but well worth it.

It had been breached by the water pressure, but the way that it was structured meant that a significant amount of what had been inside had actually survived in decent enough conditions that it was worth analysing.

It gave me a decent bit of insight into ALLMIND’s processes and industry, and, honestly, I was impressed by the elegance of it all. She’d clearly spent quite a bit of time refining her technologies, and it hovered a decent distance ahead of the galactic norm.

In one or two cases, it was ingenious enough that I made a note of incorporating it into my stuff.

Aside from the hardware, though, there was another matter that interested me quite a bit. As it turned out, some of the data storage had managed to survive.

My analysis indicated that she’d rigged them to erase the data, but this hadn’t been completely successful because the SEA SPIDER’s opening attack had interfered with the power source of ALLMIND’s facility. Entire segments had been cut off at that moment, and the ocean pressure that had followed had severely damaged much of the auxiliary hardware that would have kept it operating temporarily.

That meant that I was actually able to recover a decent amount of data from the whole thing. A lot of it was damaged, incomplete, partially dissociated, out of order, or any combination of those things, but I was able to get a few things out of it in relatively good condition.

It seemed that she’d been working on quite a few projects over the course of the last few years. I found a ton of references to various projects, and for a lot of them, I didn’t have much more than a variety of code names that I was sure had been randomly generated, since they ranged from simple, three-letter words, to an entire sentence of completely nonsensical words.

I suppose it could be said that ALLMIND wasn’t particularly creative, but honestly, when you have a perfect memory, you don’t need to be making snappy names for your secret projects.

Of all of those projects, only a scant few were intact enough for me to be able to determine their purposes. There was one for her Ghosts, and the continuing development of MDD technology that she had been putting into them, and another for a type of weapon that I’d actually already seen debuted to the general mercenary population as an experimental weapon.

A lot of the surviving files were unfortunately of little use. They were things that had already been deployed, things I’d already known about thanks to our long spying games, or things I had my own equivalent of.

However, there was one that immediately caught my interest. It was more intact than any of the other files, after all. The schematics were nearly complete, though the hard data that went into informing its design was unfortunately gone beyond recovery.

It seemed she’d been working on something special... so, of course, I was going to steal it.

How couldn’t I? It had such an auspicious name.

Building my own version of it had to wait, though. I had a lot to do, and as intriguing as ALLMIND’s project had been, it was currently a frivolous expense.

There were other matters I needed to focus on.

Over on Belius, it took nearly a full ten days for the Grid crews to pull out the old, broken material of their target of choice and replace it with functioning versions. The crews were swarming over the Grid the entire time, literally thousands of people in MTs checking the entire thing out, one zone at a time. It was about as intact and functional as we’d been expecting, which meant that quite a few sections had to be rerouted for safety while they prepared for the reactivation.

My own part to play in this had been relatively subtle. I was rebuilding the Grid’s operating system from the ground up.

After fifty years, with so many people having run around on the planet with complete freedom, there really wasn’t much of a choice otherwise. Fifty years was more than enough time for someone to acquire fragments of the code, and to then find weaknesses in that code. It had been robust, yes, and RRI had always been ahead of the curve when it came to technology in general, but the Grids hadn’t been unique.

Their design had been imported from elsewhere. Grids were a common sight across the entirety of the Human Sphere. There weren’t many planets that didn’t have them, and if they didn’t that was because the rest of the system was being utilized instead.

Therefore, in order to avoid any potential incidents, I was rebuilding the entire thing. I had no doubt that there would be newer security breaches found later, but that was better than the guarantee that those breaches already existed, and worse, were known.

Finding new breaches was going to be a pain in the ass, but I wasn’t alone in that particular endeavour, at least. I had, after the second day, put the call out to an entire team of people, and then gave them the job of analyzing and testing my work.

It was a fairly simple system. I gave them a fully annotated and commented copy of the code, and they would do their level best to rip it apart. Since these people had been recruited specifically because of their capability when it came to matters of computers, coding, and cyberwarfare, I had no doubt that they would find a way through the security measures eventually.

They found a minor breach on the eighth day. A glitch in the processing architecture of the Grid’s standard CPU, allowing a particular memory sector to shift which bits were actually read into memory. Nearly useless since it only allowed changing of integers in certain, very limited contexts, but notable nonetheless.

I’d have prefered several months to work it all out, but before now, it simply hadn’t been an option, and right now, we needed working Grids.

So long as it wasn’t catastrophic, it could wait.

On the beginning of the eleventh day, the checks had been done, the system going through one last diagnostic, and everything that could be done to prepare had been. Dunham, as the leader of the entire effort, personally started the entire thing.

The Grid’s fusion reactor had returned to life with noise like rumbling thunder. Energy flowed through the conduits, already prepared and readied. Systems started up one after the other, capacitors filling with power as the Grid awoke once more.

The cheering of the crews could be heard from kilometers away.

Material started being produced immediately, the backlog of resources that hadn’t been looted starting to be processed in short order. The first things that came off the line went right back into the Grid itself..

By the end of day, the Grid was operating at a fifth of its full capacity.

By my calculations, within a week, the Grid would be operating at a third of its capacity. In two, it would be back at eighty percent. The final twenty percent would be trickling in afterwards, because it was more efficient to bring the other Grids back online than to get a single one back to full.

In four days, the demilitarized Strider would make its first delivery, feeding the system new resources as the old ones were used up.

By the end of the month, the Grid would be operating fully autonomously. The construction crews would be going around every other Grid on Belius, determining their status, determining what was required to bring them back online, all the while leaving only a token crew spread out across the entire system to keep an eye on it all. Standard procedure called for more people, but we didn’t have the population for that, unfortunately.

As it was, we simply had to rely on smart systems and careful allocation of manpower.

It would take a few years before everything was back online even in the best case, but we’d only need another month before the spare industrial capacity of the Grids would be so large that it could support the entire planetary population without issue.

After that, the only thing that really needs to be done is simply maintain that state of affairs. Given time, the population would grow, there would be a renaissance of art, culture, and science, and, in a couple decades, Rubicon would return to its prior status as a shining jewel in the Civilized Collective.

Hopefully.

Rebuilding a civilization was not an exact science, after all.

Still, the Grids weren’t the only megastructures contributing to all of this.

Over in the Ice Field, my machines were hard at work. The ICE WORM had, over the course of the last eleven days, moved in a continuous circuit around the ice. The path it moved in was mostly circular, with only a few deviations at a few points here and there. It was a little under three hundred kilometers apart at its closest points, but the total distance of the circuit was nine hundred and forty five kilometers long.

When travelling through ice, the ICE WORM could cross that distance in an hour. When it was travelling, its Coral shielding could break up about one hundred and fifty meters around itself.

I had deployed an absurd number of machines to the surface. That group consisted of everything from MTs, to REPAIRERs, to C-Weapons. As the ICE WORM moved along, the group followed behind, trailing in its wake and removing the ice that it had broken from the ground it had passed through.

It dug three trenches right next to each other on the top, and then it went down a layer. The other machines followed, and added reinforcing the walls to the list of shit they were doing. Every time it went down a layer, the ICE WORM took a very slightly closer loop, producing a very steep incline.

Forty five hours after it had started, and all those machines had dug a trench two thousand, two hundred meters deep, creating massive crevices of ice- at which point, the ICE WORM encountered the more solid earth. The travel speed of the ICE WORM did slow because of that, but only by about a third. What had once taken an hour now took an extra thirty minutes.

But, well... Coral machines. They didn’t stop.

The pattern continued, and more and more earth was excavated, continuously, steadily, patiently. By the time they were half way down to their target, the ICE WORM had swapped to doing just two laps instead of three.

Twenty days after starting, right as the Grid was really beginning to kick into gear, I finished my efforts.

The ICE WORM dug and dug and dug- until it finally reached the only cavern that waited below. It breached along one of the walls, falling past the outer edge of the Vascular Plant. The machines swarmed in after it, moving quickly along the planned path as they finished the last of the digging.

The ICE WORM itself hit the ground with a very loud crashing noise, but it had been built to withstand those kinds of forces, so I wasn’t worried for it.

“Is that it?” Carla asked, pulling the binoculars she was looking through away from her eyes. “You’re just excavating this place? I was expecting something interesting...”

“You haven’t taken a closer look at the Vascular Plant, have you?” I asked, amused.

Carla raised an eyebrow at the camera, but dutifully brought her binoculars back up, this time to examine the Vascular Plant.

She frowned, after a moment. “I vaguely remember the silhouette being slimmer.” She observed.

I only hummed.

It took her a few more seconds to spot it, and I saw the emotions play out on her face when she did. “Hey... That looks a lot like a Skyrmion Engine.”

I chuckled.

Carla dropped her binoculars again. “Do you have any idea how much energy that’s going to take?”

“I could literally drown this city in Coral if I wanted to.” I answered. “Do you think I really care?”

“Hah!” Carla grinned. “Alright then. Let’s see it!”

A deep hum echoed through the air.

Across the underside of the Vascular Plant, blue light began to shine.