"You accompany your father on this trip at the young age of 7. You have been close to your father, actually participated in his projects and in use of his technology, with some basic understanding even of how nano-fabrication works. Your group makes many stops, learns many things. The side requesting assistance has made friendly communication, appears to be many distant sovereign planets joined together desperately for their success in protecting their freedom, an obvious choice to side with. The enemy too must be evaluated, and while the other planets know little, they know the attacker calls themselves "Progenitor", and demands obedience, authority over all others." "You are directed to an obscure route to spy on a Progenitor Establishment. You think you have landed unnoticed, and as the people get out of the pod to check out some seemingly abandoned factories, you watch in horror as they are surrounded on all sides. Your father had given you a small weapon and told you in the event they make contact you are to destroy the window. You do so, activating an airlock in the room. You then hide under the bed. You hear explosions. Suddenly, you feel one violent explosion. After everything settles, you hear faint noises. They eventually go away. You sit there alone, not wanting to come out. After many hours, you have a sudden realization, that room is all you have left, your entire world, and suddenly the coziness frantically turns claustrophobic. You must figure something out to get out, to even stay alive, who knows how much oxygen you have left in that room." *you start off on a planet designed like a "room", a play on the hallucination. You learn the controls while searching for something to help. You find a fabrication gun, a hand tool used for small scale repairs. You use it to reclaim some odds and ends, then fabricate a blueprint stored in the gun, an airtight suit.* *The world changes to a larger one, demonstrating the area around the pod. You now reclaim the door, then repair several places of the pod. You find the crew inside the pod dead, a well placed shot to the hull got to them, and you were saved because you had activated your airlock as instructed. You then repair the computer systems, then the life support, then the door you had reclaimed, which then opens as functions are restored to the pod. The pod has a much larger fabrication system aboard, fueled by a large reactor core and fed by dense amounts of matter. However, you believe it will take you time to travel anywhere, and it is risky given the situation from the attack. You decide it best to lay low.* *the world becomes larger, as many years have passed you are now 13 and have taught yourself everything you could from the computer about the technology at your disposal. You now feel confident you can control the pod and attempt to navigate home. You just need to gather more supplies to sustain the trip. You must go to the abandoned factory and check for supplies. You find a disabled metal extractor, you feel like if it were active it would be impossible for anyone but the owner to use, but you find a flaw with the inactive one that allows you to quickly make it functional for you. You find a powerplant, you are less able to fix it and more able to build systems right overtop it's dormant core to utilize the old materials, making a functional power source for you. As you begin to gather supplies for the trip, curiosity gets the best of you and you see what was so important about the factory that it was worth killing or dying over.* "This is... amazing! The factory is to produce a city-sized walking self-sustained command unit, capable of fabricating an army, useable with aquire-on-site materials, the AI has the span of control to operate many subordinate AIs of fabricated combat units and even comes with a modular interface room that seems to be designed to function on a variety of possible input devices as if it wasn't sure of the physical attributes of the pilot, how many arms or legs they would have if any, what type of sensory perception, what their size and life support type would be." "The catch is... it would take you what appears to be many years to finish construction, the product is very intricate and complex, not to mention highly dense of material. You decide it would not only be your own safest bet, but could be used to avenge your father and protect the Earth and win the war." *You are 22, and are for the first time entering the interface module you designed to function based on your attributes. The unit rises easily, as if it was built already fine-tuned somehow and required no period of breaking it in. You are now in control of a commander-class army-fabricating unit capable of almost any big or small task. The unit only appears to have infrastructure blueprints. You test it out, building a metal extractor, then several, using the shift key to queue the build list ahead of time, then some power generators, taking care not to build any structures too close together in case something happens. The build speed of the commander is amazing, it spews out numbers of nanofabricators that can only be described with scientific notation, capable of building cities habitable by thousands of people. You then try it's energy weapon. It is massive! You try it several more times rapidly, queueing the fire orders with shift key, but find that after a few shots the weapon reverts to an effective yet small scale energy slug. The weapon exhausted the energy storage. You quickly program in a way to access energy saver mode for the weapon by default, best not chance it wasting too much energy. You must now specify for it to use full power if desired.* *Next you build a factory. You were expecting it to build a variety of combat vehicles and bots of varying weapon set, but you find it just builds blank chasis. Perhaps the default blueprints of the commander was modified after being finished, had most removed. Why is it like this? You decide it was "decommissioned" as to never be weaponized, and given a placeholder blank chasis factory. You are capable of programmng though, after a while you decide you can carefully reclaim part by part the fabricator on the pod you lived in all this time. It has a large enough example of "nano-fabrication" technology, after a few hours you successfully develop a blueprint for nanolathing tools. However, you cannot figure out a good way to implement the new blueprints into the space of the existing factory blueprints. So in leau of this you decide to just create a new structure to "arm" units with this technology. You promptly label it as an "armory". You then test out building a blank chasis from factory, then sending it to the armory to be fitted with nanolathing tools. You find it would be tedious to do that to many units, and decide to use Interface Links to command the factory to automatically order chasis to arm up at the armory, then you use shift to make the factory order the units to assist the command unit after the armory. You have them reclaim you, not very effective a weapon and barely scratches the surface, although you are sure you can use it in an emergency still. You then have them repair you, it is a rather slow process because of how complicated the unit is so using them as assistants for repair while in solo combat would only be so effective. You decide you should never take a chance with that.* *you then build some defense-plates. Again, blank, placeholder. They obviously can't get up and walk to the armory, so you somehow have to bring the armory to it. You decide to edit the blueprints, add a simple link on top, now units can attach to the top of it, albeit very permanent. You attach the nanolathe unit to the top of the tower, which increases it's range and effective output. It is a shame it is a nanolathing defense, or rather a utility, as it could be used offensively but more likely in construction and repair. You program it's intellegence to automatically do tasks, repair anything damaged first priority, reclaim hostiles second priority, assist construction within range third priority, reclaim useful material from wreckage and environment last priority. You can prevent it from consuming energy by disabling power to it, which prevents it from doing anything unless ordered manually and then it stops after finished or commanded to stop.* *you hope you can find examples of weaponized technology to integrate into blueprints, otherwise any task will end up being a risk and a chore. You test out the blueprints for other chasis factories, ones that are more complex and not necessarily better in every way but definitely more useful in certain situations. Some are so difficult to build unassisted, it practically requires assistance, so you program that blueprint only into your chasis and not your commander unit itself, which clarifies that a lot for later. You have your chasis group-build this advanced factory. It's chasis are much more fragile, but have two spots for armament. You use shift to order the factory to send units to the armory twice in a row, then meet where the commander is.* "you can't help but feel this simulation rendered overhead view created by sensor collection removes you mentally from the scenario you are watching, which is a bit eerie to remember that you are inside of that. You were almost better off not thinking of your current location, it is a form of madness that the moment demands from you. You are better off going back to forgetting you are a part of the situation that you play out over your interface."
