I woke up with a start. Either I had a dream about my weird headaches or my headache came back during my sleep. But as I sat up in bed, my head cleared quickly and the pain disappeared. Just my sore back and ribs, oh joy. I got ready, suited up, and headed to the camp to grab some synkaf. Sunny was still at the campfire. “Morning Sunny” I said with fake cheer.
He watched me over the rim of his giant kaf mug. His human face looked at me with an indescribable expression. “Heard you got banged up yesterday.”
Avoiding his eyes I replied, “Yeah but it was no biggie, just a little bruising. My synths took out a Tyrannosaurus dinosaur! And I more importantly, think I have a lead on the malfunction.”
His face changed into an amused smile. “You are so much like your dad kiddo. Glad you are ok. I can see you got the better of the beastie. Be sure to put those hides and horns away, don't want to attract any critters. I worry about you, but I am not going to give you a lecture, sounds like you did all right. Please call us if you ever get over your head, ok?” With that he slammed the burning kaf back, closed his helmet and rolled away in a trail of dust, his dual treads zipping him out of camp and up the gulch in record time.He paused at the top of the trail and turned back to me, “Oh and that was a Nodosaurus variant, not a frakking Tyrannosaurus Rex!” He chuckled as he continued on his way.
“Huh?” I responded eloquently.
I didn't even get a chance to ask him how the prospecting was going. Staring at my synkaf mug for a while, I wasn't sure what to do next. Eventually the malaise evaporated, and I ordered a few of the Road-synths to collect the harvested parts and put them in a sealed bin in our primary hauler, the top of the line Kombi-max, again courtesy of BDwerks?. This mega-hauler on wheels has full environmental isolation, integrated storage, and advanced transportation features. Everything you need for the post-apocalyptic wastelands of my homeland.
We were far from full, but the pre-war artifacts combined with whatever minerals or salvage we found here would be enough to return to town and sell off. Not that I was looking forward to town, I much preferred to be out in the wilds away from everything. Shaking myself out of my reverie, I headed back to the engineer trailer. Cracking my knuckles I got to work on my Squad Leader. First, I removed the primary and secondary controllers and isolated them. I wanted to rule out common mode failures. After hooking the primary controller up to the trailer, and therefore Big Fe, I reviewed the log files from the fight.
Amazingly, the main combat sequence only lasted a minute and a half! The Squad Leader coordinated with all 10 other synths. It assed the threat, devised a plan to ambush, executed, froze, and then adapted to the threat and finished off the monster. The small group tactics seemed simple but effective. The accuracy was disappointing but precise shots were tricky for anyone in combat conditions, and the synths could use more calibration inside the newer, larger armored bodies. The Road-synths and Hopper-synths were straightforward cybernetic hacks.
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The Squad Leader however was a major upgrade. It was far more customized than the other Power Construction Corp?drones or even the American Empire cybernetics, with a bit of Black Market (bootleg CyNet?) sensor and communication software thrown in. And all made possible courtesy of Gabby Co. Not that I had even a fake corp at this time.
Back to the hardware, the Squad Leader was throwing a kernel level 0 error after 12 hours of continuous field operations, but now after about 2 hours it had thrown the same error. Something had changed. Level 0 was the resilient operations and safety protocols. This was the heart of the operating system. Essentially, if a drone or synth couldn't trust itself to operate it would shut down, the resilience protocols were adaptive and capable of self monitoring and would initiate shutdown if the synth wasn’t confident it would operate inside of given parameters. I had used the basic scaffolding from the PCC unmanned drones. While I had tweaked it extensively, I mean what researcher worth her salt, wouldn't, it didn't make sense. I began to run several parallel simulations to see what behavior would trigger the fault and what wouldn't. My psychic powers allowed me to predict minimally into the future, for me it worked best on computational executions, and less well in meat space.Combined with the raw computing power of Big Fe I could tackle innumerable different scenarios and rule them out quickly. I kept going around in a circle, the resilience logic seemed sound. I compared the diff from the primary and backup controllers and they were identical! So nothing out of whack when they failed over or voted together. I spent an entirely too unproductive day banging my head against the software with nothing as progress. As the day was winding down, I gave up. Tomorrow I decided to fix the frame and armor, that at least I could do.
Sunny waved from the campfire and Estéril smiled at me. I nodded back to everyone but headed back to the RV. The extra space was nice, but I already missed my hammock and layout in Gretta. Gretta was home, this was like staying at a hotel, the few times I went on travel with dad and we had to go to other surviving locations around the West. A quick meal and I was ready to turn in, my body still ached and I knew tomorrow could be as frustrating as today.
I woke up around 3am, my head had the same stabbing pain and nagging ache that I got the night before and when I first got injured. No, not when I got injured, but when I returned to camp. In any event, it wasn't excruciating as much as an abrupt and sudden jolt of fear of the unknown which transitioned into a nagging ache. As I looked around the bedroom, eventually the feeling went away, again. I got up and walked into the RV’s kitchen, the motion lights turning on as I made a glass of Citrus myx ? from the powder. I chugged the drink and decided to try to get back to sleep. I lay in my bed for several hours, worried about what injury could be the source of my headaches before finally drifting off into a fitful sleep.
Chapter Length. Turns out my chapters are quite short. Is that a problem?
