The First Technomancer

by G Aliaksei C

  “Thank you, Mr. Frost.”

  “I’m going to need to ramp up production.”

  Quality of life in Vazanklav went up proportionally to the value of our active defenses and the depth of my debt. Assaults by Beasts were now handled by several watchmen in the control bunker, who manned the weapons on the walls. Alarms became rare and exciting, weapons fire common and mundane. Excursions to deal with the especially large, powerful and most persistent of the attackers became a festivity, volunteers gladly showing up to stretch their powered armor and explosively clean their weapon barrels.

  The additional defenses freed up a lot of time in my days, hours which I wasted away working. Dealing with such powerful attacks had become an exercise for me, and an excellent opportunity for weapons testing.

  I did not spend twenty-five days sitting on my ass, that’s for damned sure.

  The environment I lived in now allowed my mind to bloom with countless new ideas. On Earth, during The War, weapons had to be built with consideration for weight, power requirements, durability. Here on the Rings, where Gem power was abundant, costly materials like titanium were easily accessible and combat was exotic; one could come up with any number of solutions for non-existent problems.

  For example, on Earth sunlight was non-existent. On the Rings, it was annoying.

  “Drake,” the villagers would ask, “why do you need eight hundred square meters of mirrors?” And later, “Drake, why do you need a massive solar furnace?”

  One of the upsides of having a sun that gave you a tan in half an hour in the shade is that, on sunny days, you could melt steel like butter on a frying pan - with the help of a few mirrors. And everyone knows that fabricating eight hundred mirrors is both cheaper and more fun than buying an industrial-grade furnace, especially when you live on a magical world where a haloed white dwarf is permanently situated overhead.

  Once you have a furnace that can turn steel into vapor, a lot of options are open to you.

  Did I try to melt the Monument - my own gravestone - with the massive sunbeam? Yes, fuck yes.

  It didn’t work.

  There’s a vast difference between things fabricated, and things made. In the days before The War, people would not usually make an air fan in their garage - they would buy an industrial model that was likely more efficient and practical than anything they could craft. It was a matter of resources, with providing corporations capable of researching options and optimizing products better and faster than any one person in their workshop could hope for.

  But anything you make almost always served better. A fabricated item of ‘good quality’ has strict tolerances that rarely go far past its intended use. On the other hand an item made, if it’s of equally passing quality, will often outperform itself in critical situations where a fabricated version would break down.

  A car you buy will do as little as it must to sell. A car you build with your own two hands will crush its factory equivalent in every way. Sadly very little can be accomplished by making, hence the rise of corporations and downfall of ‘home-made’ appliances.

  This formula changes with advanced, commercial fabricators thousands of generations more advanced than the very first plastic 3D printers. Such fabrication equipment, given the correct resources, can create nearly anything in its domain of production - complete circuit boards, functioning electric motors, entire assemblies of machinery. The difference between a corporate factory block and a workshop becomes only one of scale and efficiency.

  So the corporations fell back to more basic methods of profit - having access to cheaper, more available resources, and having more efficient, less wasteful production lines than any other, allowing for a margin of profit.

  Another option for profit was production royalty. By simply releasing the plans for the latest product a company could sit back and reel in cash from anyone that produced it, until a better variant became available. Such a system encouraged development of new and better things rather than their re-marketing and cosmetic re-designs, and resulted in nearly every successful commercial product coming out at military-grade quality, rather than the minimum.

  This system was heavily enforced on the Rings. To make some else’s design and not pay the royalty could yield a variety of results, ranging from a broken fabricator, to a broken product. The damage happened as if by entropy - you could make a toaster of someone else’s design, but if you didn’t pay the royalty, it just wouldn’t work, and might burn your house down.

  That’s why my Firebolter, even if reverse-engineered, was such a safe investment.

  And that’s why I spent days in my workshop, taking apart various items, studying them, and absorbing information as fast as it presented itself.

  During one such reverse-engineering session I was interrupted by a call.

  “This is Drake?”

  My own voice, clearly articulated and sharp, came over the call. “Defend.”

  When someone tells you to do something without thinking, suspicion is in order, considering that pranks are the least harmful of reasons for such a request. The legend changes if someone tells you to dodge, however.

  An inventory of every weapon that was within my reach raced through my mind. I was at my workbench down under my bunker. That meant a bolter-pistol was under the desk, a knife was on the back of my belt, another knife was in my boot, a Firebolter was on my wrist, and a vast array of tools was scattered across the desk. Fall’s folding knife was in my pocket too.

  Yet the voice said to defend, and I chose to follow its advice without additional thought. A jerk of my hand and the Bail Grenade in my pocket cracked. I teleported, praising the inventor of this variable panic button.

  Balance disappeared along with the comfort of my bunker, the seating position I was in turning traitor once the chair was removed from the equation. I fell onto the grass at the edge of my home, the ground forcing air out of me.

  Scrambling around I found the safe box buried in the ground, evicting a pair of grenades and a flare. I shifted, hiding the items in my pockets and preparing to get up.

  “Who is this?” I whispered at the Menu still floating next to me.

  “Listen,” replied my voice in my head.

  Fresh sounds reached my ears. In my time the sound resolved into a particular type of heavy rapid fire gun. The gun in question had a fire rate that made its salvo sound like ripping fabric. The same sound that day was caused by numerous point-defense turrets on the walls of my fortress, all aimed inward and firing. I watched for a moment as my defenses plowed trenches into the valley.

  The inside of the fortress was being combed by our own guns!

  Crouching now, trying not to make a sound, I snuck up to the corner of the bunker and looked at the doorway leading into my home. It looked normal at first glance, but my mind was already tinting with gold. I quickly picked out two imprints in the dirt beside the door.

  “Grenades. Entrance. Now.”

  Good plan. Why both though? Pressing in the detonation keys I flung the spheres around the corner.

  Halfway through the flight a silent stream of needle-like munitions erupted out of thin air, cracking apart one of the grenades mid-flight. I ducked back into cover, stunned by the reflexes of the unwelcome visitors and mentally estimating the chances for the second grenade’s success.

  “Charge.”

  The second electronic-warfare grenade made it into range. Static hit my ears as I rounded the corner, eyes dashing in search of targets. Two humanoids with mirror-like armor aimed stubby rifles at me. A third one knelt on the ground. They had time to pull their triggers, glance down at their rifles in surprise, drop them, and draw swords before I reached the nearest one.

  I raised my hand, prepared to trigger the Firebolter.

  With the Fall Coefficient running at full power within me now I moved faster than a natural Human ever could. The guests moved much, much faster than me though. Were I to actually engage the two, I would have surely died within seconds to t
hose gleaming swords, quartered like a frog falling into a blender.

  The plan of my savior did not consist of me actually killing the invaders, though. It relied entirely on Inna who, using the distracting and disarming effects of my attack, flanked the enemy.

  A single cut decapitated the two standing. A second slice separated the lower and upper halves of the third, kneeling. I stopped running, giving Inna’s golden outline a thumbs up.

  “Drake, how did you get out?”

  “Someone warned me and I bailed. What’s going on?”

  Inna pointed in the distance, where defenses were tearing into other invisible figures around the fortress. “Everything just… went to hell.”

  “Local - suppressed,” confirmed my voice from the call.

  “What is that?” Inna exclaimed.

  “Support. Village.”

  We frowned and began to run down the road, heading orbit-ward. I tried not to think about the raging red fire in Inna’s eyes. It looked too much like the eyes of the Syndicate I faced so many times on Earth. I knew it was the result of Inna’s cybernetic enhancements, but that did little to diminish the visual similarities in my mind.

  The small town, hope to the villagers from the old Gate town, was a battlefield. Inna’s people, with support from the automated wall defenses, surrounded the attackers and forced them into the Inn. From there the invisible invaders were taking potshots out, trying to thin out their oppressors.

  Inna rushed ahead, vanishing mid-run. In my vision the golden outline teleported forward several times, reaching the Inn and leaping through the window. One by one uncloaked stealth suits, often missing body parts, began flying out of the windows and onto the road below. The last survivor was dragged out and flung onto the pavement, helmet unceremoniously ripped off by the furious Innkeeper.

  I walked up in time to see the first glimpse of the enemy’s face. Despite the humanoid shape of the suit it was occupied by a see-through Slime imitating Human features. It squirmed, trying to flow into the protection of the armored torso.

  “Who’s the bastard?” I exhaled, coming to a stop over the scene. Before Inna could reformat the question in a more motivating manner, the Slime stopped moving. My Infiltrator grimaced and flung the corpse aside.

  I focused on the Menu floating next to me. “Voice-snatcher! What’s the situation at the factory?”

  “Suppressed.”

  “Who’s over there to defend it?”

  “Assaulter. Gladiator. Grenadier.”

  “Names!”

  “Jim. Rarus. Pessi.”

  “Good talk.” I looked around, enjoying the silence. Autocannons were no longer saturating the air with their roaring, only swinging around angrily, like dogs on leashes trying to find something to bite. “Inna, explain.”

  A villager stepped up. It was David, the group’s mechanic and the youngest of the villagers. He had been incredibly useful in putting up the Firebolter factory. “Mr. Frost, me and Jim were tuning the defense systems in the main bunker. We hooked it into the sensor grid first, and then…” He trailed off in a mysterious manner.

  “Then everything started firing?” He nodded, and I turned to Inna. “Who are these people that you cut up like butter with a warm guillotine?”

  “With a what?” She squinted curiously at the fresh term.

  “Who are these!” I lifted the light corpse, shaking it in one hand.

  “A team of Infiltrators, probably Nova.”

  “Whose filthy scum dare set foot within my walls!” I threw the corpse at the road and pointed at it. “Not how I want to start my day!”

  Inna opened her mouth, but I interrupted.

  “Half of you, get to the factory. Inna and everyone else, start combing the base. I want ever square meter checked for these stealthy bastards.”

  They took my word for orders, rushing in different directions. I thought on how I could be useful, but found no such miraculous position to occupy. I was, after all, the weakest fighter on the base. Instead I decided to negotiate with the voice. Carefully, I began to walk and talk. Inna followed.

  “Fortress?”

  “Human,” replied my voice, copying my intonation of anger and intent.

  “What are you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Where are you?”

  A strange pause. “Guns. Fabricators. Sensors.”

  “Are you in my wires?”

  “Wires…” Came the thoughtful reply. “Yes.”

  “And you control my guns?”

  “Yes?”

  What do you do when there’s something living in your walls?

  I picked up my axe. Inna drew a sword.

  “Drake,” she said. “We need to get this thing out of our guns.”

  “Inna, I think that’s a solid plan. I’m going to do the exact opposite.”

  “What?”

  I turned to my Menu. “I’m going to call you Fort, if you don’t mind.”

  “Fort. Ok.”

  “Fort, I think you noticed that I have been walking for some time, but now I have stopped. Can you tell me what I am standing on?”

  Pause. “Main cable.”

  “That’s right, under my feet is the main cable connecting my bunker and the walls. Now, I am almost certain that most of you exists in my bunker, where the largest computers and sensor nodes are. I also have an axe. This is not a threat, this is a statement, do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “I will make you a deal Fort. You have proven friendly, and you did save us from the invaders, so you can stay in my wires. In return you will, under Inna’s orders, man the defenses. My comfort is a function of the security of this base. This little surprise party our guests started made me very uncomfortable. We didn’t even have alcohol and hookers to welcome them with. Once you catch up and learn to speak in sentences longer than one word, I need you to make me comfortable. In return, I will not do my best to kill you. How does that sound to you?”

  “Agreed.”

  “Excellent! Welcome to Vazanklav.” I lowered my axe.

  “Seriously?” questioned Inna. “Drake, it’s an Anomaly. Like the grasshopper. Like the wheat. Like so many other dangerous things. Do you seriously want that in charge of your guns?”

  “Inna, how many people would it take to man every weapon in Vazanklav? To control and operate every turret and cannon?”

  She frowned. “Twenty or thirty.”

  “We have twenty-two individuals on the base, if we count Jim as one. We need as many people on the field as possible.”

  “But we don’t even know what it is!”

  “It effectively took a mass of targets, and separated it into friends and enemies, something computers can rarely do to any effect. Not only that, it decided that we were friendlies. So, a single being of undecided shape takes on the workload of twenty people, then demonstrates loyalty to the owners of the equipment it operates, and then verbally agrees to continue working with us. It’s a resource Inna, a combat resource like you or me or your friends, and if continues to cooperate with us, and if it serves our continued existence in this wasteland, then I will gladly let it.”

  Inna raised hands. “You’re the boss.”

  “Thank you.” I nodded my appreciation at her continued support and turned to Jim, who was standing a short distance away. “Jim, I need a fabricator bot as soon as possible. I just realized only one cable connects my bunker to the walls, and I have no redundancies.”

  “Right away, Mr. Frost.”

  3 : The Costs

  Day 51

  A classic Human body needs five to ten Earth hours of sleep. A Corporate needs between two and five hours. That, for reference, is twenty to eight percent of your life - an incredible, unavoidable waste.

  A proper Corporate can only comfortably sleep when another Corporate is standing watch. Every sleeping hall in the Hive had several such watchmen. Their vigilance allowed the rest of us to sleep in peace. Lack of such overwatch results
in… discomfort.

  After my death I easily accepted the safety of this world and my new, immortal nature, allowing myself two local hours of calm, peaceful sleep a day, somehow unafraid of the insecurity I was trained all my life to avoid. I slept like I had never before, with dreams, waking up properly rested and refreshed.

  Now, after the attempted invasion of my base, the paranoia of the past returned. I found myself waking up every five minutes, scanning the room, and falling back asleep. Such a sleeping pattern could harm, and possibly kill, a Human. But to a Corporate the experience was simply unpleasant and bothersome. Mornings greeted me with headaches and discomfort, a bad beginning to a day of corpse inspections.

  In over two days of cleanup we collected a total of twenty Slime bodies and suits. Half were torn up beyond recognition by the autocannons, stealth gear unable to stop the two hundred-gram slugs. The other half were carefully scanned and searched.

  It turned out that the governments of the Rings liked to arm their soldiers with better gear than the rest of the low-Class civilians enjoyed. To that regard they put a lot of work into their suits and weapons, every nation working to surpass its neighbors in effectiveness. That meant that the Class 6 infiltrators who invaded my base had some very nice, expensive lining within their custom gear.

  I stole a pair of those thin swords they carried. The rest would be reprocessed for materials and custom parts to restock our dwindling supplies.

  Rarus, Jim and Inna finally approached me with a solid plan of defense. I set down my sandwich and looked at the massive insectoid squatting on the floor across from me as she began to talk. The early morning Cafe was quiet, with Vili, the cafe owner, yawning behind the bar.

  Inna began. “The consensus is that Nova found us.”

  “You were not kidding about the swiftness of their actions.”

  “Their response time is always impressive. But this attack reveals definitive flaws in Vazanklav. We have strong base defenses, but we don’t have a reliable garrison team to rely on,” Rarus began. “These defenses are a great deterrent for roaming monsters coming from nearby Hotzones, and from Raiders. But a proper mid-tier team could easily wreak havoc on the fortress.”