The Brink and Back - Chapter 137 (Patreon)

Later that day, Mary and Ernest reported that they had picked up several occurrences across the globe that they suspected were the AIs pulling back from their many plans. The spread was interesting, to say the least, some of it didn't make much sense for a group of AIs trying to control humanity, but I suppose they had their reasons. They also reported they had to deconstruct a total of three AIs that went rogue and attempted various attacks or grabs at bower. None of the attempts went very far since they were both on high alert, but they still happened.

"Should we engage directly?" Ernest asked. "They did not all follow your orders."

"... No, as long as the majority of them continue to pull back," I said, shaking my head. "If we treat them like living beings by expecting them to be better, then we have to accept the fact that one individual is not responsible for the actions of another. If they keep getting out of hand, or we see a large shift, then that can change, but for now, as long as nobody is hurt and it's the minority, we will hold back." 

"Are you really going to let them get away with everything they have been doing?" Mary asked with a frown. 

"Absolutely not," I assured her, shaking my head. "My current plan is to judge how independent they actually are. Remember, Naraku was barely sentient, and her going rogue was more due to poor programming than a choice by her. Any of the AI in similar circumstances to her will be treated as such, but I assure you that the bastards who knew what they were doing will get what they deserve. Some will just be destroyed, others will be punished according to what they have done."

Mary nodded, happy to know I wasn't about to just completely forgive all of them right off the bat.

That night, after reviewing some of Mary and Ernest's reports, I spent a bunch of time in orbit around our primary production planet, testing the various features of the Super MAC station. We were officially calling them Orbital Defense Stations Model One, since it was likely we would eventually design a new one when I had rolled a few more tech trees.

Over the course of the night, Samwise and I ran the ODSM-1 through every test we could imagine, firing its energy weapons, firing its defensive weapons, firing them both together, and even staging drills for its drones. We also ran simulations where we pushed its power systems to their limits, simulating various faults and damage, including partial fusion core failure and more. 

Several times we even actually damaged several systems, just to observe how the station and its repair systems reacted.

We also tested the double-barrel Super MAC, aiming it at the sun so that the massive tungsten slugs wouldn't just fly off into space forever. One of these fuckers could ruin a planet, I was not about to fire them off into space willy-nilly.

Once we were done with the tests and had a list of faults and other issues we spotted to fix, I set up a schedule with Samwise. 

"I would like you to work through these and finish get the station ready for production," I said, looking out at the planet below from one of the few viewports on the station. "When we are done making a few more production sites on the surface, we can start making a few hundred of these for around the Earth, then around Avalon, then around here. However, in order to do that, we will have to build a transport ring."

"Why not build slipspace capabilities directly into the station?" Samwise ask. "With another fusion core, a slipspace drive, and some quantum computers, we wouldn't need a transport ring."

"That's because I don't want them going anywhere once they are in place," I responded with a frown. "I want these to be permanent fixtures around each planet they defend. I don't even want to have the option to send them out, or to reorganize them to different planets, or to send some of them to a new world to cover a new colony. I refuse to cut corners when it comes to defense, or to compromise the defensive system by jumping a few stations into slispace. I want people to be able to look up and see them and know there is one hell of a defensive line between them and whatever I know is waiting for us out there." 

"It is still just a hunch."

"It's a good hunch." 

Samwise remained silent, so after a moment, I continued. 

"I'm going to work on building special tricks into the MAC rounds. Now that we have some more accurate readings of just what sort of forces are involved with firing one of the slugs, I can get to work. First, I want a way to destroy the rounds if we fire and miss." 

"I understand the necessity… but the void of space is vast," Samwise pointed out. "The chances of you hitting something, even with random sustained fire from hundreds of stations, are infinitesimal."

"True, but there is still a chance, and that's enough," I responded. "Plus, having a way to stop the rounds would come in handy even if I wasn't concerned about ruining someone else's day permanently. It will make me a lot less nervous about ship-to-ship combat as well."

Samwise had to agree the idea was valid, so we spent a few hours spitballing concepts. With a better understanding of the exact forces involved, we were able to come up with a few specific ideas, with one of them that had…interesting implications.

With the right materials and equipment, we realized we could hypothetically stick an entangled particle inside the slug and have it survive the firing process. This would make it a valid target for teleportation. So, we could fire the round, activate a teleport, and catch it in a teleporter. 

The problem was that we couldn't really predict the angle the MAC round would take when it came out of the teleporter, since so many variables were at play and the projectile was spinning so fast. That variability was, unsurprisingly, unacceptable considering the amounts of energy we were dealing with. I didn't have reasonable defenses that could survive a Super MAC round, at least not reliably. I could theoretically stack a few hundred shield generators to create sort of ablative plating, each shield popping and breaking until it finally slowed the round down enough, but even then the amount of layers required really wouldn't be feasible, especially not over function, widespread tech. 

We spitballed several other ideas, tossing them all out until we finally came up with something. 

In Fallout, the plasma weapons all had a chance to liquify a target on impact. In the games, what triggers this phenomenon varied, but in the real world, it was a known reaction, with identified triggers. Essentially, when the plasma bursts hit a certain range of elements, specifically radiological elements, it can cause an energy cascade, where the power in the plasma would activate the material, which in turn puts out more plasma energy, which then activates more of the material.

This chain reaction turned all extra material caught up in the reaction into the glowing good, which was surprisingly stable and non-reactive.

Now, in reality, the effect was rarely large enough to have full goofication of a target. Instead, the reaction would continue until it didn't have any more fuel, at which point the reaction would stall and the energy would dissipate. While it was certainly an interesting effect and could do some interesting things, it was far from what the games showed. The scientists of the Fallout universe tried to weaponize it directly, but they failed, which, considering their track record, was kind of surprising. In fact, it took a full nuclear Armageddon to spread the necessary radiologicals far and wide enough for the effect to become relatively common. 

The thing was, we could rather easily infuse the MAC rounds with the necessary materials. The slug wouldn't even lose much of its effectiveness, since the radiologicals required were all much denser than the tungsten alloy the slugs were made from. We could then seal a plasma detonator inside the round, which we could likely make tough enough to survive the firing process if we built it right. Then, if the round missed or it was targeting something it shouldn't, we could turn it into goo remotely. 

Goo traveling at seven percent the speed of light was still absolutely dangerous, but it was much easier to defend against, and would slow down and spread out given half the chance space's natural radiation signature.

The problem was that doing this to the rounds would make them radioactive, and I really didn't like the idea of that. Radiation was dirty, unsafe, and was just generally a fucked up thing to be firing out of your guns, especially because MAC rounds exploded on impact due to the insane forces put on them.

Doubly so since we would be using these MAC rounds in particular to defend places we wanted to protect, and massive radiation contamination would suck really bad.

"Let's keep thinking on the idea," I said after admitting temporary defeat. "Options may be limited, but I would like to figure it out eventually. The plasma geo-modification idea has merit, but if we could lower the necessary radiation..."

"Should we hold off installing the ODSM-1s until we have a solution?" Samwise asked. "

"No, no, definitely not," I said, shaking my head. "If it comes down to it, I will make that gamble if it means protecting people. Like you said, the chances are infinitesimal that they actually hit something in the insane void of space."

With a rather unsatisfying conclusion to the dilemma, I at least took solace in the fact that the station itself was nearly fully functional, and after a few fixes, we would hop into production and finally start protecting our various assets.

Of course, we also needed to deal with a little problem before we could put all of the ODSM-1s in orbit, specifically the insane cloud of debris that was encircling the Earth.

Back home, we were already dealing with an incredibly worrying issue with space debris, but here, with megacorps and nations having absolutely no care for the environment, and actual active conflicts happening in space, their cloud of junk was four or five times worse. Satellites had to be hardened against impact because there was simply no way to predict every single little bit of scrap, so they needed to be durable enough to withstand the impacts.

Of course, I also made the issue significantly worse by detonating eighty-three percent of all satellites around the planet at once. My actions alone doubled the debris field's size and density.

It was because of that, and because I was really the only one who had the ability, who also had the need and desire to clean up Earth's orbit, that the job finally fell into my lap.

It really only took a day to come up with a plan, and even less to implement it, though it would take a long time to actually complete the job.

Step one in clearing Earth's orbit was to take care of the larger chunks floating around up there. Instead of doing something complicated, I made a simple drone, no bigger than a washing machine, controlled by a Dumb AI that could network with other drones, as well as a control hub. At the front end was a modified version of the protomatter-generation tools I had used to convert the starships I made in the bunker into water.

The drones would fly around, latch onto larger chunks of debris, and slowly convert it to harmless gases. We would make a few thousand of the drones and release them into orbit, making sure to keep them off any active satellites. There, the swarm would slowly chew through satellite wrecks, abandoned space shuttles, the remnants of various weapon platforms, and even some high-altitude fighters.

Eventually, once the large-scale problems were eliminated. I would release the next phase, which would be several hundred much larger drones, these ones acting as actual scoops. They would have large forward guiding energy barriers, built primarily from Fallout tech, that we could use to clear and gather massive swaths of space junk at once. 

This would likely take a long time to get done, but the goal would be to get most of the debris cleared before activating the third and final stage.

The remaining small shards of junk would be pushed down into Earth's atmosphere, where they would harmlessly disintegrate on re-entry. We would do that by making several hundred more drones. These drones would run extremely detailed scans of the space ahead of them, before using lasers to push these smaller pieces of junk out of their stable orbits using something called radiation pressure.

Basically, light is weird, and getting hit by it actually imparts kinetic energy. In normal light, this energy is so small it has no noticeable effect on most anything. But a laser, on the other hand, can be used to push things around on a tiny scale. Considering I have access to quite a few laser systems, we would have no issue pushing down everything until the entire orbit around Earth is cleared. \

It was very much a long-term project, with the first phase likely taking close to a full month to complete, but it was worth it to have it going in the background. It wasn't like I needed to launch anything from Earth's surface anyway, so having things flying around on their own power was fine, plus the Dumb AI network keeping track of everything, and they had more than enough sensors to avoid unwanted issues.

Once I finished designing out the first two phases, leaving the third for later in case I needed to adapt to new developments, and I finished programming everything, I headed out of my workshop. It was early in the afternoon of day seven, with eight days remaining in the break cycle, which meant it was time to have a very important meeting with Mary, Ernest, and Sable. 

For more than a week, we had been closely monitoring Megacorp and government assets across the planet. Mary was spending a huge amount of time doing so, and we had been printing off minor Dumb AI like hotcakes, installing them all over the world to listen in. During that time, the world's higher-ups had been gathering resources, planning attacks and defenses, squirreling away emergency funds, basically scrambling to do something, anything, about our rise to power. They had been running, hiding, preparing, calling in favors and everything in between, trying to figure out what was going on, how they could stop me, and what their next step would be. Some of the more daring ones had even come out of hiding, thinking that the threat was over for some reason.

Now, after a week of listening in, Mary had a portfolio, a list of targets and all of their resources. Now, rather than just skimming the scum off the top, only to watch it reform later, we could dig in and remove the source now. 

Basically, we knew every branch, leaf, stem, and root of the corruption that weighed down on humanity, and now we were going to tear it all out.

Well… we were going to start tearing it out, since trying to do it all at once would be chaos. Pulling off a massive, global shift in power, and pulling the rug out from under every major group on the planet at the same time and expecting the world not to spiral into anarchy would be stupid, so our goal was to do this one organization at a time, starting with the NUSA, and the major companies inside it. 

I had been tempted to start with Arasaka, but that would have been unreasonable. Yes, Saburo was a violent, power-hungry, greedy prick, and when we took him down I was going to celebrate, but the fact of the matter was that he loved his home. He spent massive chunks of his fortune fixing up Japan, to the point that it was actually a wealthy, relatively healthy country. His nationalistic mindset meant he was unlikely to lash out at his people in a major way, while other places, with other megacorps and governments, would happily sell their people down the river just to bump their bonuses up a few percentage points, never mind ensure their survival.

Now that everything was on the line for them, things were a lot riskier, and we needed to be aware of the urge to lash out.

Of course, we knew almost everything about our first targets, including what their plans were, so going in order of who might do something stupid was just another layer, because we were fully prepared to stop those who were already actively being idiots. In fact, Mary had already stopped a few of the more stupid plans from being enacted.

I arrived at the security room, where Mary, Ernest, and Murtaugh were talking with Sable and a few people I didn't recognize, a woman and an older man. They were both standing straight as a board, the kind of stance that spoke of long-spanning military experience. As I stepped in, Sable smiled and gestured my way.

"Jackson, I'm glad you're here. This is George Sterno and Jessica Kouneli," She introduces as I approached them, shaking hands.

"Nice to meet you both," I said, shaking their hands before giving Sable a look.

"Jessica here is ex-NASU Special Forces, and George was her commanding officer, running her squad for nearly eight years," Sable explained. "They are part of the consulting team working on our first take over."

"Special Forces?" I asked, looking at the woman. "Impressive."

"After seeing what you guys are capable of, it doesn't feel much impressive," She responded with a snort. "The Tulip Program alone would make my old squadmates weep in jealousy."

"When Jessica was booted from her squad, she was stripped of all her sponsored cyber and bioware," Sable explained. "As part of her signing deal, we replaced her chrome with custom made biologic replacements, then gave her level two of the tulip project."

"Level two? I would have assumed you would go for level three."

"There's a level three?" the woman asked, her eyes wide. "How many levels are there?" 

"It's not offered to just everyone," Sable explained easily. "And there are four, but the final version is not recommended for casual users. It is a lot of modifications to handle."

"That's… that's incredible, though it does explain some of the stories I've heard," George responded, Jessica still seeming a bit stunned.

We discussed some of the information they had gotten about our advancements, clarifying a lot of the data coming from the open combat we had seen while tearing through the world's WMDs. They were mostly on point, though we did need to clarify a few smaller details. Before we could move to the planning process, all of us moving to a small in the corner of the security room, I redirected the conversation.

"Apologies if I'm digging up a topic better left buried, but what exactly put the Ex in the title of Ex NUSA?"

"A few months or so ago, the team was given a mission to acquire some hardware from a warehouse that was definitely not owned by Arasaka," George explained. "We had some issues with high-ups demanding… unnecessary brutality a few times, and up until that point we had managed to skirt around while still technically following orders."

"Someone didn't like that, and laid out a direct, unavoidable order, with no room to wiggle out," she explained with a frustrated voice. "I know getting dirty is part of the job, but they wanted us to clear a civilian building next to the warehouse, just in case anyone saw us, with no exceptions. It was an apartment filled with two hundred people, including a few dozen children, and they wanted us to kill all of them. Needless to say, I scrapped the mission when they adjusted the parameters. Commander Sterno fireballed his career to keep us from getting flatlined on the way back, but the cost was me getting dishonorably discharged and stripped of all benefits."

"From there the writing was on the wall," George finished. "My favors might have held off the consequences, they would find us eventually, so we slipped away."

"We were making our way to Night City when you started cracking down on the gangs," Jessica added. "Your Spartans are incredible robots, I've seen squads of special forces with less flexibility and combat awareness."

"They are one of my favorite achievements," I admitted with a smile. "They are controlled by a hive mind of Dumb AI, which is a learning and adaptive program with no real sentience. With several of them working together, we achieve much higher levels of flexibility, almost approaching a low-level Smart AI like Mary or Ernest here." 

"Why not make more of these Smart AIs?" George asked, glancing at the aforementioned AI. "Their capabilities are astounding, working with them has been extremely enlightening." 

"Because true AIs are alive, and I don't like the idea of printing out living beings on demand. We have a few different AI working with us that are alive, Ernest and Mary being two of them," I explained. "I might end up making another Smart AI soon, to lessen the load on them, but for now, the Spartans are more than enough." 

The conversation quickly shifted to the topic of our coming assault on NUSA and Militech, though, honestly, they were both the same thing at this point. 

"So… tell me, what do you think the chances are that we could get a portion of the military to surrender if we capture Myers and have her surrender publicly?" 

"Not very high," George responded, shaking his head as Jessica frowned. "Too much nationalism spread throughout the military. The higher-ups won't let go of their power just because you have her, and the soldiers believe too much in the fight to just surrender. Honestly, you'd have better luck getting Militech forces to surrender, since they are just people getting paid."

I let out a curse, leaning back heavily in my chair. After a moment, I fixed them both with a look.

"This is going to be a snipers-in-every-bush, bombs in every car type scenario, isn't it?" I said, unable to keep the disappointment from my voice. "The American people are going to answer a call to arms no one is making."

"Probably," Jessica responded with an understanding wince. "Especially in the Southern states. Hell, I'm shocked they haven't started a succession already since Myers hasn't done anything to stop you yet." 

I rubbed my hands over my face, pressing my palms into my eyes. On some level, I already knew this was going to be a problem. But sitting down and discussing the process really brought it home. This was not going to just stop at killing the people responsible for ruining the world. People would react poorly to us, and we would have to react in return.

"Before this starts, I need to design a suite of non-lethal weapons," I said, shaking my head. "We already have the sedative gases, but I want a variety of options."

"Your work during the riots here was well done," George pointed out. "An incredible display of non-violent resolutions."

"Watching the idiots wake up and look around, confused as to why they had been spread all around the city was pretty priceless as well," Jessica pointed out with a smirk. "Most corps would have wiped them out the second they got close to their property." 

I didn't respond, and after a moment, Sable put her hand on my shoulder. 

"We can arm the Spartans with non-lethals, and have Noah start producing prisons," Sable pointed out. "It won't be perfect, but combined with our riot-breaking methods, we will be able to curtail the worst of the civilian casualties."

"What if we don't go full open aggression?" I asked. "We could make a portal into any bunker they have, in any building. Why not just have me walk in and talk to Myers? Maybe we could do a slow surrender?"

"That may work at first, but the second anyone figures it out, it will come crashing down," George pointed out. "They will see it as a chance to make their own Dogtowns, to grab pieces of power for themselves. And worse, you won't be in combat positioning, so they will have time to wreak chaos before you can step in." 

"So there is no way to go but through," I confirmed, finally admitting what I already knew. "Alright. Well, the least we can do is secure infrastructure before the population knows anything is happening, so we can deal with one, and then the other. What are the targets you suggest hitting first?" 

We settle for a long planning session, the first step of creating an actual battle plan. Our main focus at the moment was coming up with a sweeping plan that encompassed the whole country, picking priority targets and more. 

Once we were done, Mary, Ernest, George, Jessica, and a few dozen other people would set about planning the smaller assault, the hundreds of actions against military bases, bunkers, and government buildings. It would be like all the missions we had in Night City, clearing out gangs and megacorps, rolled into one and magnified a thousandfold. 

Thank God Samwise went overboard with the number of Disc Stations, and the massive force each one could bring. Each station had five hundred Spartans on board, ready for action, meaning we had an army of nearly fifty thousand Spartans ready to deploy basically anywhere on the planet.

The meeting took up the rest of the day, with two breaks before we finally called it quits. We were getting incredibly close to the first major move to taking over the world, finally making some headway as we fixed the problems that had humanity spiraling around like it was a doomed ship in a whirlpool. When the meeting ended, I shook George's and Jessica's hands again, wishing them both good luck in planning the more small-scale details.

With any luck, by the time my current break was over, NUSA and Militech would be under our control. We would likely have work to stabilize it, but once we did, we'd select another target and keep moving. 

Sable and I both crashed into bed that night, a day of working and planning taking its toll on both of us. As we lay there, I couldn't help but consider some of the harsh realities of our mission. I knew there was no way to fix this world without breaking it first, but that didn't mean I was excited to watch it snap back into place.