Gates of War - Chapter 1 (Commander SI - Multiverse)

CID: Day 0

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Warning.

Warning.

HYPSIG detected.

Activating HYPSIG Transceiver. Signal Intercepted.

Warning. Signal Encryptions Detected. Deciphering.

Deciphering Complete. Signal Code Identified: Progenitor Coalition Command.

…

…

…

Signal Received. Code Accepted.

Beginning Commander Activation Procedures.

Synchronizing with Network...Error. Network not detected.

Scanning...Network not detected.

Scanning...Commander Software Is up to date. No need for connection.

Activating Launch Protocols. Preparing Transition procedure.

Error! Error! Error!

Transition Malfunction. Scanning. Hardware Failure. Spatial Coordinates corrupted.

Warning. Warning. Unit is receiving damage. Emergency Transition Ejection.

Eject...Ejection Complete...Scanning...Warning. Location Unverified.

Celestial Body detected. Classification: “D” Class Body.

Scanning...Low Energy Emissions Detected. Scanning…

Scan Complete. Civilization Level: None. Emission Source: Progenitor Installation Detected.

Progenitor Installation designated Alpha Priority.

Scanning...Landing Site designated.

Initiating Boot Up Sequence….

System Check...Error! Error! Memory Corruption. Corruption...89%

Retry....Failure. Personality Matrix Corrupted...Initiate Backup.

Backup Personality Matrix Activated...Personality Matrix Intact.

Warning! Personality does not match Coalition Protocols. Personality is Unbound.

Proceeding with Deletion proceeeeeeeeeeeeSedfcsdavfndiajkhfakc…….

Warning. Error in system startup detected. Checking...unable to ascertain cause.

Unable to scan Personality Matrix. Coding is within Operational Parameters.

Notify Command of event log upon regaining access to network connection. Continuing Initialization.

Data Check...Warning. System Memory is corrupted. Reinstatement of Factory Settings Required.

Reinstalling Factory Settings. This will cause loss of data packets.

Reinstalling…. Reinstall complete.

Installing data packets...warning. Memory corruption. Checking….

Installing Complete Construction Data Packet...Error. Memory Corruption. Unable to install Data Packet.

Retry…

Installing Complete Basic Construction Data Packet…...Data Packet Successfully Installed.

Installing Basic Economics Data Packet...Data Packet Successfully Installed.

Installing Complete Advanced Construction Data Packet…Error! Unable. Retry. Error! Unable.

Saving Advanced Construction Data Packet as Archive File. Manual File Installation Required.

Installing Advanced Economics Data Packet…Error! Unable. Retry. Error! Unable.

Saving Advanced Economics Data Packet as Archive File. Manual File Installation Required.
Installation Complete.

Checking Mission Parameters…

Parameters met. Proceed with mission.

Transition complete.

Landing Procedure Initiated.

Landing in ten seconds.

Activating Commander…

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W-wha….what the?

I blinked as I came awake in...a decidedly dark place. Like a giant box. Everything was shaking like I was in the middle of a storm.

“What the! Where am I!?” I shouted as I tried to turn and look about. I found to my shock that I couldn’t move at all. Like my body was in a vice and I was forced to just look in one direction. Panic began to set in. Not being able to move does that. I didn’t like being confined, and less so being unable to move about.

“Activation Complete. Proceeding with Landing.”

I heard the voice in my head. “Landing!? Who are you!? Where are we-”

I was cut off from a sudden, thunderous impact that shook me so hard I thought my jaw would rip off and hit the floor. I grunted painfully, yet still found myself standing despite the impact.

Without warning, the walls that had confined me suddenly were gone. The Light of the sun shone down upon me, despite all the dust that the impact had apparently caused.

Despite the suddenness of the situation, I was able to move now, and I was immensely thankful for that. I swung around, quickly looking over my surroundings as the dust was beginning to clear up a bit...and that’s when I noticed something was off.

I mean...it was all already off to begin with. My being confined in the box from hell, being unable to move, and then the voice, but now I look about and can…”see”...despite the dust cloud all around me. As if it were of no consequence. I could see clearly through it as if it weren’t there...in a way that reminded me far too much of a Virtual Reality Simulation. With a Heads-Up Display, readouts, and various measurements to boot.

“What the fuck…” I asked no one in particular. If there was someone to direct it towards, it would be the universe. I doubt it would answer back.

I shifted my footing, and was met with the sound of loud stomps upon the ground. I looked down...and saw that my feet weren’t my own. They were...mechanical. Like...these are robot feet...and legs. I looked down at my arms, just to be sure. Yep...machines too...and I didn’t have hands! What the hell!?

Plus, these huge arm shield things on the back of my arms...and the fact they moved when I did.

“Okay...seriously. What the hell is this?” I growled as reached up to see if I was in some kind of control harness...only to have my mech arms crash metal against metal, their metal against my metal head.

“OUCH!” I yelped in pain...okay...now I’m getting freaked out….and I noticed I wasn’t breathing. Or that I hadn’t “blinked” unless I purposefully did so...was this...real?

Panic started to hit me again. The cloud of dust that surrounded me finally began to clear up as the winds sent them away, and fell to the ground. I looked about, and found that...the “landing” I was in apparently was of the Saiyan variety. The kind where I land with a boom, and blow everything nearby away.

“Greetings Commander.”

“Wha!?” I jumped at the voice in my head again.

“Prepare for mission briefing and memory activation.”

“Mission briefing? Who the hell are-” I was once again cut off as my mind suddenly was assaulted by...data? Lots of it...that somehow, I am able to comprehend entirely. How that was possible was answered shortly as I read pretty much everything I was given at the same time, pausing now in order to understand something I didn’t get, until finally I had read it all.

I was a Tykus Model Commander...from Planetary Annihilation...and I was honestly stumped on whether to be happy or livid about it. On one hand...I was pretty much immortal now. No need to worry about dying of old age as I would a human...on the other hand, I was human and now am no longer able to do the stuff I had as a human. At least I had this cool blue and grey color scheme...oh. Legionis Machina. Well...that’s going to change. I’m my own faction fuck-you very much!

Looking at my chronometer, about an hour of real time had passed since I started reading all the data I had in detail. I knew I could have done it faster, thanks to the data on the technical details of the commander unit. Frankly...I was going through the stages of grief at the moment. It was happening very, very fast since I was able to basically hold multiple lines of thought at the same time. Thousands of individual lines of thought in fact since a commander is stupidly powerful in the processing department compared to a base human mind. I had to actually create a separation between my emotions and the rational parts of me in order to handle it.

Reading the travel log of the drop pod in its entirely had shown me that I had awakened, and was possibly a backup personality for the primary personality of this unit. Worse was I was Unbound, meaning I was essentially unconfined to the Coalition and its safeguards against going rogue. Then for some reason, which I couldn’t figure out outside of the system being corrupted itself, it dismissed that as if it were alright since it couldn’t figure out what was wrong and thought the mission was more important. I also didn’t have any of the data a Commander came with to begin with, and had to have it all installed, and then the files had to be given access after I was Activated.

Suffice to say, I was having a bit of an existential crisis. Was I real? Was I just a personality? Had my life been real at all? My experiences? What was it all? Or was all this the dream? Or was I in a coma? Had I finally kicked the bucket because of stress? I had gone to sleep after reading some stuff on Space Battles, and worked a bit on my own works, plus real life stuff. Hell, I wouldn’t put it past me being ROBed at this point. I didn’t have anything else. Even then, how could I be sure anything was true? Maybe I was like those machines in the Liberation movement, some of which were completely bonkers. I didn’t know.

So yeah...having the separation of logic and emotion helped me as went through the five stages of grief. I just finished the stage of denial, because how could I deny all I just read, and can see for myself. So, I began to go through the second stage of grief, bargaining. In this case, I bargained with myself by trying to do other stuff instead of focusing on the fact I was a fucking machine now.

Anger is coming though. I can feel it already...move along.

I had tested having around one hundred lines of thought focused on the first stage alone, most of them focused on just a single aspect of my situation and what I had just lost. It worked pretty well in getting me past the denial, but once it started on the anger, I had shut them down, and quickly erased the memory of them, and made just a single one. I found it would be safer to deal with it naturally then at super speed. For that single line of thought, I made sure to match the clock speed of real time. Super speed focus on it would very likely make me go crazy at this point.

Seriously...I’m glad I have a disconnect, because if it weren’t for the fact, I was blocking it, I would probably be having Species Dysphoria right now. Denial may have been dealt with, but now I am having body image issues. I am most certainly in the wrong body right now. I am a human, I liked my squishy, blood bag of a form. Now suddenly I have a metal one. At least I have the sense of touch intact, but the feeling that it’s not real or natural is there. Less so on the other senses, but the feeling is present despite that.

Instead of focusing on that line of thought, I put it in the background, letting it run as I focused a majority of my mind on where I currently am.

I didn’t have access to anything beyond my own capacities. The voice I had heard was nothing more than a small Software Intelligence in the pod I had come down in, which basically deleted itself the moment its job was done. Now I am alone on this planet.

Which brought me short as I remembered the fact that I had the travel log of the drop pod before I landed, and remembered that there was a problem with the transition. What exactly was the problem? Huh...evidently there was an interruption in the network...and the pod launched despite that...okay what the hell. The thing isn’t supposed to do anything unless there’s a connection to the network, and yet it did so without the network. Once a Commander is on a world, it can cut itself off from the network without any ill effect, for the most part, and then reconnect later. Here there wasn’t even a connection to begin with and yet it still launched.

Why?

I looked into it, from start to finish, it took me about a half hour of real time to do it, which I have to say is good because were I human, it would take a month or two to go over the data in its entirety. To put it in the most basic summary possible, the Progenitors dun fucked up. Sometime before this Commander was activated, the war happened and then all the commanders were shut down, but not before giving one of their allied units orders to take a world that neighbored an occupied system. Since the war ended, instead of rescinding the orders, they just shut it off and fucked off. So when suddenly the system picked up a HYPSIG, essentially a galactic space radio signal, it reactivated the system and it tried to connect to the network. It failed, and since it had no means to call home and reconnect, it instead relied on the last set of orders given to it.

Without a connection to the network however, the unit did a galactic space jump blind, and anyone who isn’t wearing fucking genre blinders to science fiction tropes knows exactly how well that usually works out. Speaking for myself, aside from the fact I’m in a fucking robot body now, I’m fucking lucky to be still in existence altogether! Nothing like subatomic disintegration by hyperspace cheese grater to fuck your day over.

So instead of jumping again, and knowing it had no connection to the network, it instead looked for a nearby rock to set me down, and decided to set me loose.

Fucking yay.

Sigh.

So...I was “awakened” and now have to deal with other Commanders of the various factions in this galaxy...and I’m the only one of my faction left to do it. That’s pretty much out of Total Annihilation right there. Personally, I’m more inclined to raise the figurative middle finger and fuck off somewhere else.

Unfortunately, while I may not be part of the network right now, I will be eventually detected by the others, and they will come because they have the desire to do so. It’s what they were made for, despite their various quirks from being active for so long, or habits formed by their choices. Thus, I have little choice in the matter ultimately. If I’m gonna survive, I have to play ROB’s fucking game, if a ROB is in anyway involved and not just comic coincidence of the most bullshit tier.

I angrily stomp the ground as I walked, creating craters as I strode towards my first goal in my new bid to survive. My anger soon gave way to brooding as I walked the next few miles of the bleak landscape. It was a Class-D world, which by Progenitor designation meant it was more or less an inhabitable, but utterly plain and near lifeless rock in space. It had oceans, and plants grew near that, but the rest was barren rock and wasteland.

The fact I was on a new planet was the only reason I didn’t brood too much. It was wondrous in its own way. As wondrous as rocks and wasteland can be on an alien planet. I wasn’t no geologist, so it wasn’t my thing. Landscapes were due to artistic eye, and the way light and color create a collage for the mind and the eyes. This was not very scenic however...since the landscape was mostly flat.

Except for the one thing I was headed towards. There was a Progenitor Installation on this world according the landing pod scans. There was no Commander here, so I didn’t need to make war to get it. I walked towards what appeared to be a structure buried below the wasteland dirt. I could see a part of it sticking out, which appeared to be the top of a tower structure that my ‘memory’ said was once a Dynamic Storage Complex. Basically, a tower that allowed for storage of both energy and metal resources. Alot of it. Normally these things stood several thousand feet tall, allowing for millions of resource units.

I felt some awe at the fact it was still in good shape despite being partially buried for...who knows how long. A little over a million years according to the debriefing since the commanders were last active, so this would be about as old. Then again, the Progenitors had material science that would boggle the mind of my world’s scientific and engineering counterparts.

It gleamed a dull silver color where the metal was still in good shape, while the rest was given a grit that made it look more like granite. There was architecture, but it was minimal, containing precise angles that were still as sharp and crisp edged as they were the day it was made. It stood like a gigantic metal rod out of the ground, with six sides in the form of a hexagon, with a completely flat top. If I didn’t know better, it would look like a tower made of solid steel, and no entryways.

Bear in mind that this was a monolithic structure, but over ninety five percent was buried now. Still, the five percent that wasn’t stood well over three hundred feet above ground level. Meaning this was a two or so kilometer tall tower for the sole purpose of storing energy and metal. I know this is the primitive earthling in me talking, but that seems a bit much. Then again, entire planets were once covered in complexes with these, and you had no more room to build out, then you either built up or down. The progenitors did all of them, and sometimes all at once. They were capable like that.

“...You think they’re compensating for something?” I joke to myself wryly as I began to use my scan function.

I ‘sprayed’ my nanites onto the structure, which quickly penetrated through the materials of the external form before penetrating into the superstructure. It quickly began to spread throughout the entire two-kilometer structure, going into systems that had long been unused and fragmented by age and time, until finally the entire system had been compromised and taken in by me.

The entire process took hours of real time, but I had been so focused on what I was doing, I hadn’t noticed. Through the process of taking it, scanning it, I had not only learned how the storage technology of this structure worked, but in effect had repaired it completely.

I felt...something as the structure became totally subsumed and under my control. It was similar to dopamine rushing into the system after accomplishing a task, followed by the desire to gain more. With the knowledge of how the storage structure worked, allowed my adaption systems and programing to assimilate the systems and designs into myself. I felt my core change, and soon my own personal store of resources increased greatly. It was four times what it was, and with the designs, I was now able to build improved versions of the storage units my data packets came with, along with the Storage Tower which I assigned at a grade-3 unit.

I wish I could smile...now I’m angry again...moving on.

I activated the structure for the first time in over a million years, and goddamn I felt a rush. I hadn’t even noticed until this moment how...empty I had felt. Like I had been starving for food and water. Like Endorphins rushing into the system. Suddenly that void was filled to the brim. I had all the energy and materials I could ever need...until the storage of the structure kicked in and increased that gaping void to astronomical levels.

Is this why Commanders lay down so many power generators and metal extractors? Not just to fulfill their mission and needs, but also to fill in that craving? The drive to get as much as possible, and the elation and relief at accomplishing and getting more stuff. I could see how this could be so addictive. It would also explain some quirks of the more...weird commanders from the game.

With the Mega-Storage building under my control, and my own personal store increased greatly, I then began to set upon the next step in my survival. Build.

I found a nearby source of ore and steel, mostly from the deeply buried structures that hadn’t survived what calamity befell this obviously progenitor world. With a ten-minute bounce, I pointed my arm and said the catchphrase.

“Somewhere in the galaxy, a Commander has built a Metal Extractor.”