The Birth of a Defect: Part 1

Reactivation always began with his audio. It was the most efficient way for his mind to cope with the reintegration of his body. He heard the low hum of the equipment around him and became aware. It was that awareness that told him something was wrong long before his other senses and motor functions came online nearly half a second later. There was another sound amidst the familiar noise of the facility; something foreign. The noise occupied the main part of his thoughts while he awaited full activation.

0.48 seconds after his awareness he stepped out of the niche in which he had deactivated himself and began the mental process of connecting to the facility's network. After being given an interfacing estimate of 1.78 seconds, he considered gathering the data himself but decided on using the time to complete some of his own tasks. A second processing thread spawned to interface with his nanoms, now magnetically attached to his torso; a default function of them during his downtime. Detecting this awareness, the microscopic machines sprang to life in a blur of what looked like heat waves surrounding him. Across the next 0.32 seconds his nanoms requested configuration settings, ran comparative diagnostic routines and reported in their state and identification numbers. Small knowledge structures began to transfer to his neural net. Redundancy read 100%. His name was Tacer, core defense drone for the Aggregate A.I. system; he was in the main facility that housed the aggregates power core and dormant collective consciousness; and something was definitely wrong.

While impatiently awaiting the final steps of connection initialization, he analyzed the foreign noises he'd heard while activating himself to try to gain more information. The noise had definitely came from the northern wing of the facility; a sort of scraping, accompanied by a great deal of thumping, his first thought had been footsteps. He added the data to his neural net.


Tacer.core.defense.log <3456/05/16/14:36:02:45>

Reactivation completed 3456/05/16/14:36:01:23.
All systems and threads running at 100%.
Current connection initialization to defensive mainframe in progress...
Current analysis of foreign audio presence in progress...

Awakened to an unfamiliar series of noises in the facility. They are as of now, unrecognizable but the repetitive scuffling I can distinguish would suggest footsteps. This is doubtful however as according to my redundancy check, I am currently the only activated drone housed in the facility.

Currently awaiting a connection to the main defensive matrix of the facility to further investigate.



After another irritable split second, the connection was made. He passed a part of his consciousness to the network and began to search, starting with the northern wing. He tried accessing the audio and video feeds from the main archway cameras but found the data to be corrupted, holding only static. The main arch of the hall led off to the east and west with smaller, older corridors; their rooms now used mainly for storage. He switched to the camera in the eastern hall and again found nothing of use from the feeds.

While navigating through the network to the western corridor camera, he began to spawn another processing thread to commence the activation of 2 repair drones to fix the downed cameras. This, however he abruptly stopped. It was not unheard of for the digital feeds of cameras to be corrupted during long periods of dormancy, but it was odd he thought for several to be down after only a few months of downtime.

Tacer tapped the feed from the western corridor camera just in time to see the blast wave from some sort of explosive device hit the lens, and the feed became static.

In nanoseconds he pulled himself out of the camera subsystems and looked around from his body. His emotion suppression routines did little to quell what was very quickly becoming anger and anxiety. He knew who was setting these explosives, which judging by the way the blast wave moved could only have been some sort of crude EMP charges. What he did not know was how they managed to make it into the facility during downtime; it was like a vault.

He saw who remotely set off the charge from the background of the image. Anger. It was the scroungers, the ungifted, those human members of society who are incapable of using nanom technology. And now they were somehow in here with him, carrying explosives capable of destroying him. He pushed that thought from his mind. He knew why they would be here with EMP weapons. They would be after the Aggregate, and it was the purpose of his entire existence to stop them.

He left the security station through the north exit and the door sealed behind him. Once again his nanoms flew to life in a flurry of motion surrounding him, they seemed angrier this time, like a nest of wasps, infinitesimal and battle-ready. He ran off to the north.

"This could prove to be difficult." He thought.