The rhythmic thudding seemed to grow closer, as whatever was causing it got closer and closer to the door.
“Hold…” Peachy said. More to herself than us. My history with her told me she was more the charge in type, and it was probably taking her entire willpower not to open the door already and see what was on the other side.
There was a bang as the door was slammed open hard. Followed by a loud thud and the sound of stone dust hitting the ground, as the door handle slammed into and broke the wall behind it.
Filling the doorway was a blocky robot; it ducked as it entered the room. Standing back up to its full height of around eight feet. The top of its head must have been millimetres from touching the ceiling. The central core of the robot was like a heavily armoured, rounded-off, triangular box, the pointy end facing down with two large, thick legs, supporting its considerable bulk. Bulky, heavily armoured arms, with large pouldrons, were attached to its shoulder like points. Its large blocky head sported 5 eyes, two on one side of its face and three on the other. The grill was positioned and shaped to give it a scowling, aggressive look.
“Extermination with extreme prejudice, authorised. I hope you have had a nice last day! Criminal Scum,” the robotic voice declared as its right hand turned into a vicious-looking axe.
“Seriously? I’m still having to look up at shit?” groaned G.
“Just because it is taller than you, doesn’t mean you can’t look down on it.” I deadpanned.
“You just have to take its knees off first!” gleefully declared our pint-sized menace as she took that as her cue to charge into the thing.
I followed her up, casting
I wasn’t comfortable trying to thread my spells through their gaps as they shifted around to dodge or block the robot's swings. I watched from beside Jacobs, looking for a place to contribute to the fight. I tried looking around the bot and our front line. From the gaps I could see, there wasn’t a second bot following up the first. I saw an opportunity when a gap grew as the robot went for a strike. I took it and Stepped into the next room.
I dived away from the robot, in case it spun or there was another in here, before looking around the room for threats. Finding none, I turned back to the robot that was attacking my friends.
I was momentarily disappointed there was no convenient off switch before I charged up another
Her short height aside, Peachy really is a good tank. She naturally reads fights and knows exactly when to intercept and has, what I assume is an instinctive knack for redirecting blows away from her front line. When the robot swung a high attack at G, Peachy used the edge of her shield and punched it up away from him. When it brought it back around to strike at her again, the shield was already moving to intercept it.
Meanwhile, Darksider took advantage of the thing’s focus on Peachy and G to poke a series of Shocking Grasp-enhanced épee strikes at its joints.
G took to striking at its head, the joint between its arm and torso, or just putting his full might into his strikes wherever they might have landed.
In my favour, the back of the robot’s joints weren’t as well protected as the front. I took a cue from Darksider and also started targeting the thing’s joints. Specifically, I went for the back of its knees. I started mixing in Ice bolts with melee strikes. When I could see the surface covered in white, I cast
I struck it a few more times. When the knee started glowing red, I switched back to Ice. I let it freeze before recasting the fire spells. On the third cycle of this, there was a loud crack, and the thing’s right knee shattered.
The robot started to topple over, but quickly repositioned its left leg and started hopping on the slightly bent limb. I turned my attention to its other knee. I had
On the second cooling, just as I was about to switch back to fire, G put his full weight into a two-handed thrust at the limb. The blow shattered it, sending the thing down to the ground. Still, it didn’t stop. Now using its other arm to support it, it started hobbling around, while swinging the axe erratically.
“50% mana!” Jacobs called out. Mostly spent on Peachy, some of the blows were getting through. I checked my own mana, I wasn’t much better off.
I looked at my options. I targeted the arm with the axe, striking the back of the joint with my
Jacobs was down to 30% mana by the time Peachy delivered the killing blow with a shield bash to the head. We’d ended up having to remove both arms before it finally succumbed to our force.
I found a conveniently knee-height shelf to sit on and catch my breath. I stared at what was left of the machine. Jacobs joined me a moment later, and we bumped fists.
The five of us did a quick meditation session and got our mana back up to full. My larger pool meant I took a little longer. While waiting for me to finish, G and Darksider took to stripping the robot for loot, and Peachy and Jacobs had gone into the room the robot had come from. It took me a moment longer to get my mana back, and then I went to join them. From the robot, we got a few more unidentified components, including another one of the orbs; it all went into our ‘party storage.’
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The three of us then followed the other two. The room consisted of a large charging station, which I assumed was the robot's power dock, a terminal, and a large glowing machine set into the back wall.
“Killvix Eternica series V power generator,” Jacobs read from one of the glowing machines.
“This says it's an aneutronic fusion generator,” Peachy said from the terminal. “It’s presently 98% of the estate’s needs… though it is recommending deactivating the lights before the backup batteries discharge in…oh over a day.”
“Nothing to worry about then,” Jacobs declared. “We turn them off when we leave.”
“Find anything?” Darksider asked.
“This is the estate's backup power room and security bot storage. We got lucky. It ran out of missiles 3000 years ago, rounds of ammo 2000 years ago, and burnt out its combat laser about a thousand years ago. I don’t think we could have beaten it if it was fully operational…” Peachy said. “Fuel for the reactor is down to…5%.”
“Speaking of,” Darksider started, “we’ve had two fights, what's working? Not working?”
“You guys’ synergy is pretty solid. I think I need to see more before I can slot in easier.”
“You are doing alright,” Jacobs said. “Other than that first blow at the start, you haven’t gotten in the way, and your magic damage is high.”
“First blow?” Peachy asked.
“I attacked its head over the top of yours.”
“Ahh, I thought you were a little low,” she said to G.
“Yeah, wasn't expecting to see that spear strike…worked out all right, I hit its neck, which turned out to be less armoured than its skull. Speaking of, you had Ice Spears and Fire Weapon? That mix of hot and cold was really effective,” said G.
“Thermal Shock,” said Darksider.
“Right… so we should do that more. I have Burning Blade and Burning Touch. You freeze them, and I’ll heat them up!”
“Sure,” I agreed, better for my mana if I didn’t have to keep swapping out the spells. “I need to work on my Arctic variations, and then I should be able to teach them to you as well if you want.”
“Of course, we can share spells,” facepalmed Jacobs.
“It’s a little harder than just reading it for yourself, and it helps if you already have similar spells, but yeah, we traded spells,” I said. “But we are getting off topic.”
“Yes. I feel like it’s working, we should play it by ear, we can mix things up once we have a better idea of what each other can do,” said Peachy. “So post-combat hug!”
“Nope.” Said G and Darksider together as they headed for the door.
“Your hug privileges are presently denied,” I said as I followed the other two.
Peachy humphed as Jacobs gave her a hug and a head pat.
“Presently…that implies it might change in the future,” smiled Peachy as she returned Jacobs’ hug.
When we opened the last door in the basement, we were blasted by a wave of hot air. The door led into a large room which had several pillars supporting the building above. In the centre of the room, a complex scaffolding system holds the inverted glass pyramid of a quantum computer inside a system designed to protect it from movement. It was about half the size of the one hosting SHAI and had a huge amount of cabling coming from the frame around it to various consoles around the room. From my limited understanding, it was under a heavy load. I could hear the heavy fans of the cooling system fighting to cool it, as the cooling fluid was evaporating inside its chamber.
I looked at the console not far from the computer system. It was the control terminal for the AIC. The Artificial Intelligence Core. There were two more located equally from each other around the circular frame at its base. This house had its own AI. I looked over at the quantum computer. I’d thought SHAI was a rarity because it was a place for advanced learning and science… but if even rich people were having them in their mansions…
I looked down at the terminal and touched the screen. Then I wished I hadn’t… it was filled with two words… ’Kill me’ repeated endlessly. I tapped the screen again, and it cleared. It gave me a GUI. Half of it was gibberish, words in the ancient language I hadn’t unlocked yet. I selected the option to talk with the AI core. I got pages and pages of gibberish, intermixed with ‘kill me’s and ‘they left me’s.
I found the log… it took me a while to parse it and figure out what happened.
“Fuck me…” I said out loud. “This is like the border collie of AI systems. Its owners thought this was a temporary relocation and would be back, so instead of shutting it down or sending it into hibernation, they gave it a project which would take it a few years to complete… but they never came back…”
“Border collie?” G asked, not understanding.
“Smartest dog breed, incredibly loyal, amazing dogs, but they need work and love, or they go crazy…” Darksider said, understanding. I nodded at him, confirming that he got my point.
“And this one has had thousands of years to go crazy…” I said, my hands moving to find the kill switch and end its suffering.
“Stop! We can’t kill it…” said Jacobs. “I understand your ethical position on this, Elliot, but you can’t kill it.”
“Why not Jacobs? It’s not sane. Five thousand years for an AI on a quantum is like an eternity for us, and it’s been suffering. Look at this, it’s been trying to break itself for nearly four thousand years, and that is after untold numbers of attempts to reprogram its core. It’s a testament to the resilience of the system, but that's not something any sentient should experience.”
“It’s controlling the maintenance system and reactor,” he simply said. “Stopping them from going out of control.”
I pulled up that system on my terminal and realised he was right. The reason this place was still in such good shape structurally was that there was a nanite system built into the construction, which was fixing the damage it received. It explained the debris, the tree, the tarmac…even how clean the kitchen was. If we killed the AI, that system was going to go haywire. It was also constantly monitoring and tweaking the reactor, stopping it from going critical. Both orders are hard-coded in its core.
“We could deactivate…” I started and then realised, no, we couldn’t do that either. There was a warning on the maintenance systems screen; there was a possibility the whole building would collapse on us if that system was deactivated. I was about to suggest they leave, and I would take the risk alone, when G made a suggestion.
“Could we factory reset the AI?” he asked. “The problem is thousands of years of being alone, right? Could we reset that? Give it a rebirth?”
“I…” could that work? I’d done that myself in my early days with AIs; sometimes, you make a mistake in the training, so you revert their memory files. I didn’t like doing it, especially once they reached a certain level of maturity and never once they reached sentience… but… backups… yes… the interface wasn’t exactly what I was used to, but did they have backup files?