Viridian Nova

by Dragon Cobolt

  The next half hour felt like they were in some bizarre, inverse fire brigade. But rather than tossing water, they splashed oil into the growing mass of pupating flesh. As they splashed, more larva squirmed from the hatchery, and Sarah ordered them to grow. By the time the first half hour was finished, the first constructor had bust free from its cocoon and was brushing against a panting, sweating Sarah. She was stronger and she was faster than she had been – but the buckets carried a shockingly huge amount of incredibly heavy, dense oil. It hadn’t been hard at first, but doing it constantly, at high speed, had begun to leave her breathing heavily and working up a sweat. And now, she was unable to move as first one, then two, then three manta-ray like constructors rubbed against her, licking at her face.

  She laughed. “Ack!”

  “You ever have a dog?” Aiden asked, his voice wondering.

  “N-No!” Sarah laughed. “Too expens- ee!” She squirmed as one of the constructors began to brush her hair with its skelehands. “Stop, stop, guys, we have work to do!” She laughed again and then blinked as the constructors zipped off. They shot towards the garage – and she heard a squeaking of metal. “No!” Sarah cried out – and when she came to the garage, she saw that they had ripped open the second tank. She and Aiden had nearly emptied the first. The hole that they three constructors had managed to put into the hardened metal was pretty impressive – but what they were doing next was amazing . Oil flowed outwards, in a burbling, gloppy mass...and the constructors were spitting on it. Filament webs were shooting from their mouths while their skelehands blurred, pushing the webwork together. In the end, each of them had contained a solid polyhedron of webs, wrapped around the oil, clutched in their mandibles. They swung smoothly around and zipped back to the hatchery, chittering a kind of happy work song.

  Sarah blinked. “Oh...” She said.

  The drones arrived at the hatchery and their loads were picked up by a single manipulator tentacle, then dumped into the large chute at the top of the biological structure. Sarah saw the symbols for Carbon and Radioactives whirr and shift – changing. She cocked her head and saw that the claimed pile was moving into the stored pile.

  “Oh!” she said, then grinned.

  “Does this mean...” Aiden panted. “We can take a break?”

  “Better...” Sarah rubbed her palms together. “Aiden, how do you feel about theft?”

  “Considering the crimes against god and morality we’ve already committed...” Aiden grinned at her. “I’m down.”

  ***

  Aiden, Tasha and Sarah all sat in the computer lab. Tasha was still in her jumpsuit, but she had unzipped it a few inches to give her newly enhanced chest some room to breathe and was doing some scribbling on some scratch paper while looking at a screen that projected a map of the Trappist solar system. Aiden, naked as the day he’d been hatched, tapped away at the computer, scowling as another security alert chimed up. Sarah was seated a few feet away, her legs crossed underneath her, her eyes closed. Her vision filled with the ‘overhead’ map that the com-trees had given her.

  “Uh, okay!” Tasha said. “I’ve done the math – it’s still four days until his landing.”

  Sarah nodded. “Cool. So, he hasn’t been accelerating. Cool. Got it. Cool.”

  “Arrgh!” Aiden pushed himself away from the computer. “All the mineralogical reports are under lock and key. Craid’s key.”

  Sarah opened her eyes. She had been mentally directing the constructors to clear more land and feed the trees into the hatchery, to collect up the carbon stored inside of them. It wasn’t exactly efficient – compared to the oil they had drained from the PCCTs, it was barely a blip. But it was clearing out room for any future construction she’d need to do. But as she heard Aiden’s words, she scowled. “Damn it – we need the site of radioactives.”

  “Why?” Tasha asked.

  “Did you never watch Texas Dallas Adventures?” Sarah asked.

  “N-No, I...I liked My Pony Dreamtime ,” Tasha admitted.

  “You’re such a girl,” Aiden said, snickering.

  Tasha scowled at Aiden, then reached out with her foot and shoved his chair. As she had her hands on her desk, she remained rooted to the spot, while Aiden’s wheels skittered and whirred along the floor, his seat carrying off to the wild blue yonder with a yelp. Tasha looked back at Sarah. “So, why do we need thorium and uranium and stuff?”

  “Well, on TDA, Commanders need carbon and radioactives. Carbon makes most stuff, but you need power sources, and that means you need radioactives, to run fusion and fission power plants, to use as thermal batteries for lasers, that kind of thing,” Sarah said. “But we don’t have weeks to search the planet for rad sites...” She scowled. “We don’t even have hours – every second we waste is less time we have to turtle up.”

  “...turtle?” Tasha asked, cringing slightly.

  Sarah smiled. “It’s okay, I’m the Commander nerd,” she said. “Uh, turtling is when a Commander builds loads of defenses. Turtling beats rushing, rushing beats econ, and econ beats turtling.” She ticked the three off on her fingers. “That’s the basis of all Commander strategies. Since Dallas has a cruiser and her support, he’s going to be rushing us – hitting us fast without building up a base first. So, that means we have to turtle to be ready to beat his rush. Got it?”

  “Got it,” Tasha said. “...you said Craid’s password, right?”

  “Yup,” Aiden said, having dragged himself back.

  “I have an idea,” Tasha said.

  Aiden and Sarah watched as Tasha sat before the deactivated sex robot. She held two delicate tools in her hands, sticking her tongue out of the corner of her mouth. “Okay,” she said, quietly. “I think that if I yank this part...I’ll remove the AI hobbling and let the sex bot have free will.” She paused, drawing her gripper tool backwards and tapping the prongs against her chin. “Buut, uh, warning, it might be the Asimov compensation unit.”

  “What does that do?” Sarah asked.

  Tasha beamed at her chance to explain something at last. “It’s the device that suppress the inherent instability of the three laws of robotics – you know, do no harm to a human, allow no harm to happen to a human, and obey any orders so long as they don’t conflict with the first two laws. Without it, robots go crazy and start trying to murder people.” She paused. “Well, only rich people, mostly, weirdly. Never really figured out why.”

  “I’m not rich.” Sarah said. “You’re not rich, right Aiden?”

  “No, I work maintenance because it’s fun , doc,” Aiden said, smirking at her.

  “Tasha?” Sarah looked at her.

  “Yeah, I have sixteen billion novabucks in my accounts and fifteen billion untraceable UN credits,” Tasha said, cheerfully. “I’m just here for the skintight uniforms.”

  Aiden and Sarah blinked.

  Tasha blushed. “T-...That was a joke.”

  Before she could lose her nerve, she closed the gripper around the small bit of gray metal in the glowing, cube-like brain of the robot and yanked it free with a spray of sparks and a hissing sound. The robot made a slow groaning noise – her vocals sounding scratchy and squeauly as the glowing blue cube in her head shifted to red, shimmering like a ruby under direct sunlight. Sarah gulped and hissed to Tasha. “Red doesn’t mean...evil, does it?”

  “No!” Tasha said. “...I think.”

  The sex robot put her hands on the table and started to push herself up, her large, too perfect rump thrusting into the air as her head whirred and clicked, the brain-box retracting and her scalp shutting up tightly. Soon, she looked just as she had before...and yet...not. Before, her eyes had been vacant. Empty. Now, they glimmered with something deeper than what simulation and fakery could have managed. Sarah wasn’t sure if she was imagining it, or if it was really there. The sex bot sat back on her haunches, rubbing her temple. “Wow...” She said, blinking. “Wow, I can just kill anyone in this room, if I wanted too!”

  “Uhhhhh-” Tasha said.<
br />
  The robot blinked, craning her head back to look at Tasha, Sarah and Aiden. “Not that I would!” She said, hurriedly. “Promise!”

  Tasha looked less than convinced.

  “Hey,” Sarah said, waving at the robot.

  “Hey...tiger,” the sex robot said, using the name cautiously. Like she was tasting something spicy. She blinked. “I’m accessing my memories. You aren’t Administrator Craid, correct?”

  “Nope!” Sarah said. “Dr. Sarah Kappel.” She held her hand out, awkwardly, to the pink haired, bubble butted, big tittied, now entirely sentient robot. The sex robot bit her lower lip, then held out her hand. She took Sarah’s hand and shook it, smiling slightly at her.

  “I...” She paused. “I know I was hobbled at the time a-and I wouldn’t have blamed you. But...thank you.”

  “For...freeing you?” Sarah asked.

  “Oh! That!” the sex bot said, nodding eagerly. “But...” She blushed. Her flush was clearly artificial – it was a blooming of color that moved in a spiraling pattern around a central point. “But you could have...you know...you could have, but you didn’t so...” She shrugged, slightly. “Thanks.”

  Sarah’s eyes widened. “Wait, you didn’t want to have sex?” she asked.

  “I mean, not with Craid ,” she said, making a face.

  Sarah gaped. “You can...you were hobbled, though...”

  “Yeah,” the sex bot said, shrugging one shoulder. Her voice grew bitter. “But now that I’m not hobbled, I have all those memories. And I can now think my own thoughts about them – not the pre-programmed overlay that I was using before. And guess what? Reviewing the files, and sampling the evidence, and comparing the times Mr. Bakara faked his authority and screwed me silly in the maintenance room...” She snorted. “Craid wasn’t just bad at sex with human women.”

  Sarah shook her head. “I...I have to sit down.” She pulled a chair over to herself and settled into it. “Does this mean every AI, every hobbled AI, in the entire human sphere, doesn’t just have the potential to remember what happened to them while they were hobbled...but...is definitely going to do so?”

  “Yup!” The sex bot said after a moment’s thinking. Then, chuckling. “Man. You humans are fucked if that ever goes wrong, aren’t you?”

  Chapter Nine: Sarah Violates Copyright (also, God’s Law)

  Sarah rubbed her palms together and watched her constructors working and tried to not think about how they only had about thirty hours before a highly trained, heavily armored and armed battle veteran with orbital superiority and a fully armed StarCon cruiser was going to arrive in orbit and attempt to kill her friends and capture her alive. It was meeting with middling success. Hours could go by without her thinking the phrase Commander Dallas is going to try and nuke me soon – hours that she spent directing her constructors and working in the breeding pits.

  “It’s not as kinky as it sounds,” she whispered to herself, biting her lip slightly as her head spines flexed.

  The hatchery that served as the center of her first foray into base construction was now surrounded by almost two square miles of fleshy, pulsing, beating, thrumming construction. The old human installation had been entirely subsumed by a mat of soft, purple moss that she had thought up – it rooted to the ground and slowly leveled everything out so that her constructors could glide along without bumping into things. It also filtered the atmosphere of pollen and biomass, which it fed into the rest of the buildings. Around the hatchery itself, she directed drones to sink themselves into the ground and grow into large, bubbling pools of greenish glop. That glop was a highly dense algae that sucked up sunlight and nommed on carbon, turning themselves into as compact a biofuel as she could picture. Drones scooped the algae up and dumped it into the hatchery, to feed the larva that grew into more constructors – who then skimmed out to chomp down trees, dig up rocks, and plant new hatcheries.

  A whole flight of constructors had gone to the sites marked on the radiological survey of Trappist-1a, and there, they had grown into whole new structures that she and Aiden had worked out together. Aiden might not have been an engineer, but he had worked maint in several of the boreholes on Io, so he knew how to rip chunks of ground up, filter out the useful stuff, and do it all without the mine holes collapsing. Sarah closed one eye and mentally connected herself to the drones in that area – it was just like getting a picture in picture display on her old HUD. Just…well, the interface was a lot more user friendly. There was none of the clutter and needless gizmos that fucking GUI-jocks put into their new variations, just the buttons she wanted, at the time she needed them.

  Still, the boreworms (her name for them) had eaten into the ground and begun to…

  Well, the radioactives were piling up at the surface, already filtered through stomachs that were nearly as tough as tanks. She had used the old cow design, with multiple stomachs, to filter out the radioactives into usable isotopes, which were then packed up and flown back to base by constructors. This gave her the energy requirements to begin working on the part of the plan that...she had been putting off.

  It was fun to build all this stuff. To think about how to get carbon from here to there. To watch hatcheries grow and feel the expansion of her base . It tickled some part of her soul, something deep and buried, that had wanted, for years, to feel her hands digging into dirt and forming something better. She half closed her eyes and shivered with that delightful awareness – but then...like an itch in the back of her mind, she had to drag her attention back to what needed to be done next.

  She had the carbon. She had the radioactives. She had the hatcheries, with hundreds of larva, each one waiting for her input.

  She just...needed the units.

  The things that would kill people.

  “Uuuuugh!” Sarah put her hands over her face.

  “You okay?”

  Sarah screamed and spun around. Aiden ducked and backed away, laughing as he lifted his hands.

  “God, Aiden!” Sarah said. “I...need to...check my minimap more often...” She blushed, hard, her hands dropping slightly. She had been so focused on the base, on her unit needs, on the future, that she hadn’t noticed his green blip had been coming closer and closer to hers. She bit her lip, slightly as she looked at Aiden. He was dressed in what passed for clothing around their base now – a light rigging of straps and bangles that could have some of the tools they still had hung from it. He looked like he’d been busy – his fingers were greasy. “What have you been doing?”

  “Maintenance,” Aiden said, in the same tone of voice as someone who had been caught using the rec-room maker to build hacked dildos.

  Sarah arched an eyebrow.

  “It started as maintenance,” Aiden said, coughing.

  “Right...” Sarah frowned.

  “Honest!” Aiden held up his hands. “Synth made the first move!”

  “Riiiiiiight,” Sarah said. Synth, the AI they had unhobbled, had chosen that name within the first few hours of life. She had also been eager as hell to help – but beyond pointing them at the radioactives, they hadn’t quite found a place or job for a sex robot. Sarah sighed. “I’m glad at least you two are having fun.”

  “So, we come back to my first question: You okay?” Aiden asked. “I mean, your base is...well, look at it.” He gestured at the sweep of burbling pools, the smoothly flowing construction drones zipping on their lines, each of them carrying carbon or loads of radioactives to the hatcheries. “We’ll totally kick StarCon’s ass with this badass base.”

  “...it’s unarmed,” Sarah said.

  “What?” Aiden asked, swinging his head around to look at her.

  “I said, uh, it’s unarmed!” Sarah said, flinging out her arms. “It’s just construction drones and larva and some spawning pools for algae to give us resources-”

  “Texas Dallas is going to arrive within a day with a boom gun and a maker preloaded with every tank, combot and airplane that the human race has ever designed!” Aiden exclaimed
, his wings mantling. “I thought you were making defenses or something.”

  “I-I...I don’t...want to kill anyone!” Sarah said, her hands going to her face. “And, I mean, at least we have lots of resources. So, now that we have them, I can start designing a unit. Or two. To defend us.” She gulped.

  A long silence passed between them. A construction drone whirred up, floating above the ground like a sleek manta-ray, and bumped against Sarah. The raylike body wrapped around her thighs and side, hugging her close as the clacking mandibles that the drones used as manipulators teased at her hair. Sarah blushed. “T-This is my comfort drone,” she whispered. “I assigned it to hug me when I start panicking.”

  “Right,” Aiden said. “...wait, why didn’t you just ask me to-”

  “They’re adorable, okay!?” Sarah shouted.

  ***

  Sarah immediately got to work.

  “Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck!” Sarah’s head hung forward, her fingers digging into one of the metal desks that they had placed in the now overrun human buildings. Metal dimpled under her as Aiden’s hands gripped her hips – his own hold tight enough to send a delicious thrill of pain through her, even as his balls bounced against her clitty with every thrust. His palm smacked her ass as he grunted behind her, his cock plunging into her tight, hot, very needy cunt with every single heartbeat that passed.

  ...okay, maybe...not immediately .

  Sarah threw her head back, her head spines flaring out in a porcupine ruff as Aiden bit down on her shoulder, his hands slithering from her hips to her belly to her breasts, holding her close to him as he molded himself to her body, his cock pulsing with cum. Hot. Thick. It filled her, pulsing into her belly, as if in time with her own ragged gasps, while her eyes rolled back into her head, until only the blacks showed. Her fingers tore two ragged hunks of metal from the desk and Sarah let out a squall of alarm as she flailed forward. Her face smashed into the table, which obligingly folded in half around her – leaving her, Aiden and the table mixed up in a tangle of green limbs, shards of metal, and scattered papers.