I woke up with the sunrise shining into the cab again, my headache had returned but not, perhaps, with the same force as the night before. I was glad to see the trend was heading in a positive direction, as I got ready for day five at this campsite. I almost slipped on the middle rung as I clambered down the mech, but I managed to catch myself in time. Looking around quickly, I was relieved to see no one, but a few Road-synths were around to see my slip. I repeated my routine and headed to the campfire for kaf. Sunny had left already, but I saw a message waiting in my queue in the peripheral of my eye via my head-comp. Sunny’s message let me know that he and the mining synths had switched to drilling deeper pilot holes and mineral assays. Yesterday they didn't find much of note other than some trace iron deposits and no salvage. They were going to continue for 2 more days and then we could decide if we wanted to pull up stakes here and move on. This news meant I had at least 2 more days to work on the errant Squad Leader, and win my bet to boot.

  I headed back to my usual station and sank into the hover chair with a comfortable sigh. Cracking my knuckles I returned to the reinitialization setup for my prized pupil. I would need to run several calibration tests to ensure the new physio-mechanics has been internalized by the Squad Leader’s controller. I decided to finish replacing just the backup controller and button the synth up again. I would continue to poke and prod the primary controller on my bench as the backup relearned how to walk. When it was fully configured I could copy its profile into the primary controller and the synth would be good to go, minus the fatal system crashing, of course. The cyborg armor/ disguises were the easiest to remove and replace, and in less than 45 minutes I had the synth walking laps around the engineering trailer. I queued up a series of more progressively difficult physical challenges, running, climbing, jumping, rolling, crawling, dodging, etc for the synth to perform this morning. I wish I had mobile drones that could film and follow, but that was something else to put on my list. Instead, I tasked a Hopper-synth to follow and record the performance. The video feed could be sent directly to the Big Fe mainframe here in camp, at least. I turned my attention back to the controller logic.

  Sinking my consciousness into the primary controller for my Squad Leader synth, I began my work. I rarely needed a tablet or portable computer, I was the user interface after all. I pulled up the operating system kernel for the primary controller. I had spent an entire day troubleshooting this bugger two days ago and couldn’t find any problem with the resilient operations protocols. I decided to give it a go again and reinitialized my simulation for even crazier parameters to figure out what state would cause the synth to freeze, crash, and reset. The Squad Leader controller and therefore synth would come online fairly quickly after a reset (from a human perspective at least), but as we saw with the previous battle, the reset could occur at the worst possible time and lead to a total party wipe, or worse. I began launching the simulations in Big Fe and varied time, terrain, proximity, sensor inputs, anything I could think of to trigger the fault. As I sat back and reviewed the progress, a thought began to niggle at the back of my head. Something about one of the runs had made me think I was off track.

  Proximity.

  What was different about this outing versus all the other outings? This was the first time I had accompanied the synths on a combat trip. The synths had engaged in combat before, and had gone on longer trips, which is when I learned of the 12 hour reset. But this time I was directly involved in combat. The safety protocols! I had assumed the synth was failing to adapt to some new parameter or condition and the resilience subroutines were crashing. But perhaps it was the safety protocols in kernel level zero instead! Pausing the simulations, I pulled up the logic for the safety protocols. It was all very vanilla stuff. It hadn’t been tweaked much at all, which is why I overlooked it at first. The resilience operations stack is where I had done some major hacking to kick this synth up a notch and start it on the path to a true self-aware neural mesh machine. The safety protocols were a cut and paste with variable names changed. Where the original drones had a ‘do no harm’ to American Empire officers unless directly ordered by a superior officer, and a ‘avoid harm if possible’ to humans in general, I had hardened the commands to ‘do no harm’ to all camp members and an active command ‘prevent harm’ via a Guard Target mode, to make sure I didn't get hurt. But this seemed all straight forward. It's not like that sort of command hasn’t been used before in artificial intelligence. This emergent neural mesh I was building was one of many that had this sort of prime directive to not allow any harm to key staff. I wasn’t trodding new ground here so I couldn't figure out how this was different. Humm.

  I leaned back in my hoverchair and watched the fully clad cyborg-synth Squad Leader climb up and over the 3 buses, jump off, and roll to the back of the bus to continue climbing and jumping all over. I remember running through the labyrinthine tunnels of the underground complex and climbing on the various research equipment when I was a child, but at what age did that sort of thing stop being fun?

  ‘Prevent harm.’ It was based on a standard Guard Target profile. It's possible the active command to prevent harm wigged out when the synth decided it had directly or indirectly caused me harm when the tyrannosaurus dinosaur, err whatever it was, had charged at the scrimmage line. But at most the synth should have asked for new orders from me or moved onto the next most pressing directive. It makes no sense to freeze because you are worried you did a poor job! You know what a poor job is? Freezing in combat! So if I had a tentative reason where the synth was failing in the control logic, I still had no idea why it was doing it predictably after 12 hours on patrol. What was so special about 12 hours away from camp?

  Thinking back to the conditions normal subjugated drones operated in, I knew they went on short, but also long-term patrols, sometimes for weeks at a time. Heck they mass produced them enough to consider them disposable pest eliminators. Where pests are, of course, intelligent aliens, humans that happened to be born without corpo or Empire sponsorship, or anyone who disagrees with the fascist government.

  >>Not that I was bitter, Big Fe.>>

  But it was rumored that dad was killed by the American Empire, not that I know what to believe any more. So if the drones were used to long-range operations, why was my modified one crashing after 12 hours? The other modified synths weren’t doing that. I reached out to a vanilla drone in bus #2, one of the ones I haven't got around to modifying or suiting up in a disguise. The legs were gone but the spinal mounted core controller and sensors were intact. I remotely fired up the drone and reviewed the protocols for long range patrols, searching for 12 hours.

  A ha!

  Phone home. The ‘bots were required to at least attempt to phone home every 12 hours. But if they cannot, due to damage, range, or interference they would continue with their prime directives, no muss no fuss. So why was my one Squad Leader choking? My other synths were fine.

  So if it wasn't the resilience operations, and it wasn't the safety protocols, what did that leave? Reaching for my kaf mug, I realized 1) it was empty long ago and 2) it was well after lunch. I looked forlornly back at the campfire and outdoor kitchen, but it looked like everything had been cleaned up. I debated heading into the trailer RV to get a drink other than water and decided to go for it. I stood up and stretched my aching back. After a stroll to the RV trailer to loosen up my limbs, I grabbed a Citrus myx ? and made a big batch to take back to my workstation.

  Returning with the pitcher in hand, I filled my mug and sat back into my chair. Eyes glazing over I began to review the logic again for the two protocols. Perhaps it wasn't one or the other, I realized, it could be an interaction between the two. The other synths had a much simpler resilience operations protocol as compared to the Squad Leader. And the drones didn't have a resilience suite of protocols, they had a standard adaptive learning protocol that was quite limited, as anyone who had ever fought a drone could attest. But fast and lethal, I had to hand it to their designers for that. At this point in my investigation, signs were pointing at some sort of emergent behavior in the interactions between the two protocol stacks. I didn't have a strong desire to recreate the circumstances by putting myself in harm's way again. I decided to create a simulation and run it in Big Fe. After stepping through a recreation of the attack I noticed the function calls to the safety protocols from the resilience operations. As soon as the call was placed, I traced it to the safety protocol. What was interesting is that in the simulation the exception was caught, as it should be, and advanced to the next primary directive. In this case, ensuring my security by ordering the other ‘bots to recover me. If Big Fe’s simulation didn't reproduce this particular error we might have a hardware defect after all.

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  I had ruled that out because my telemechanics inspection hadn’t found anything failing or broken. I blinked my eyes and came out of my coding trance. After a few sips of my drink I picked up the primary controller and inspected it with both my helmet micro-lense and mental probes. In its current state, there was no fault anywhere! But part of my resilience protocol actually adapts the controller hardware on the fly. The software can recombine and organize the hardware to optimize the needed operations, especially the prioritized ones like safety and resilience operations. I fed the simulator into the primary controller as a hardware-in-the-loop setup and the crash occurred! It looks like this error was a unique combination of the generic safety protocol, my modified resilience operations protocols, and the specific controller hardware that I had added for this Squad Leader. I reached back to the other drone I was inspecting earlier. Now that I knew what I was looking for, it looks like there was a small deficit in the transmorphic hardware for the Squad Leader. Stupid corpo quality control; I purchased name brand CyNet? systems. They used these compute fabrics for everything. I purchased 4 top of the line kibi-compute nodes for my squad leaders, and this is the fekking result?!

  Of course I had missed it too, because whenever I was testing the hardware it was not self adapting on the fly. I would need to change my testing routines going forward. I made a note and sent it to Big Fe to propagate. Back to the Squad Leader, I bypassed the section of corrupt hardware on the primary controller. I psychically called Squad Leader to return to my workstation and the borg-synth trotted back toward me. I had it stand up into the harness and I cracked its chest to get access to the secondary controller as well. After inspecting the secondary controller that I had reinstalled inside the synth, I discovered the exact same hardware failure. What is the point of backup controllers if they suffer from the same flaw! 2 processors with poor hardware, just my luck.

  I bypassed the damaged portion of the transmorphic processor in the compute cluster and cloned the physio-mechanic profile and copied into the primary controller. I then reinstalled the primary controller. And for good measure I crafted an exception handler that would look for future errors in the neuromorphic hardware’s response to the resilience operation protocols. Hopefully future hardware, no matter how flawed, would catch and recover without crashing. Faster than a human could perceive at least.

  I was buttoning back up the Squad Leader when I received a message from Sunny. Sunny to Gabriela, come to our location at once, we found… something. I was excited. Before I went to check it out, I sent the Squad Leader and 5 Hopper-synths and 5 Road-synths to accompany it on a 12 hour tour. Its mission was to observe and evade, but not engage, it should survive the night that way. I set up a maneuver tree sequence: Patrol & Observe ELSEIF Surreptitious Evade ELSEIF Active Avoidance. In other words, run away if you see anything.

  I looked around the campsite, I didn't want to hoof it the 8 miles to the dig site Sunny had sent, and we had a decided lack of hoverbikes or small craft no matter how much I complained. I spied an extra jetpack I was going to refit and install on one of the synths. The electric battery was full and I slapped it onto the hooks on my back, Gabby engineering at its finest. I sealed my helmet and took off toward the mining site. As I looked back to camp I saw two Hopper-synths from the bus take off in pursuit. I didn't remember ordering them to accompany me but I was glad I had summoned them. The 8 mile flight took 5 minutes. Better living through technology indeed, eh Big Fe? As I flared the jets, Sunny rolled out a dig shaft cut into the side of the hill. He waved at me excitedly.

  “Gabby, great to see you! I don't know what we have here but it's something unusual.” he spoke quickly, his excitement spilling out. “As you know, we were drilling deeper pilot holes looking for varying mineral concentrations. In this one spot the miner-synth hit something and didn't know what to do. It called me over and I checked it out. At first I thought it was a false alarm, lots of random stuff underground. The thermal, optical, and sonic sensors see nothing below us. But I didn't understand what the drill bit had hit. So I ordered the big boys to start digging. As soon as they got here the two Heavy Labor drones began creating this tunnel down 15 steps or so. Come look.”

  Sunny immediately rolled back down the tunnel. I could see the pilot hole 20m further up the hill. As we descended, I could hear the miner-synths still reinforcing, digging and moving earth.We came upon a small outcrop in the tunnel and found a dull black metal tube running from above us in the ceiling down into the floor.

  “So what is this?” I asked. Rapping it with my knuckles.

  “Exactly!” Sunny said excitedly. While I couldn't see his face under his helmet I could tell he was beyond excited.

  “It’s an old pipe?” I answered him.

  “It's an old, invisible, advanced material pipe that goes…somewhere.” He retorted.

  “Run that by me again,” I asked.

  “Right, so I told you, that when the miner-synth’s drill hit something, it was this pipe above us. I ran my scans and didn't see anything. And ‘nothing’ was more suspicious than something. Here look, I will use my hand scanner and you can see what it reports.” Sunny explained as he raised his secondary left hand and moved it over the pipe slowly. He sent the sensor feed directly to my head-comp. The feed scrolled across my left eye. I understood about half of it, but what I did see looked like rocks and dirt. But not a pipe or man made material.

  “Now it's not super strong or anything. I was able to dill the top with a bit of force, but I didn't want to damage it until we figured out what this was. It's transparent to all the sensors that I have. I have the big drones tunneling a switch back so that the path will be stable and we can keep going lower and see where this pipe leads. I hope it’s not a fancy pre-war septic tank. Though, you might be able to sell ancient shit to the right buyers.”

  “I could give it a look around, if you want?” I offered. He looked at me for a moment and said, “Sure why not.”

  I returned to the surface as Sunny followed me. I sat down, cross-legged, a bit harder in body armor than you might think. I closed my eyes and let my mind wander. I eventually felt the out of body experience trigger. I looked around the ephemeral world that I co-existed in, and walked back down the tunnel. I wasn't fully in the Astral Plane, or Dreamtime as others called it, but I wasn't fully in the Material Plane either. I could phase through material but I didn't want to get lost. I made my way back to the pipe as the drones and everything ignored my presence. I placed my immaterial hand on the pipe and willed myself down.

  I sank, and sank and sank. It is very hard to tell distance in the ephemeral halfway world. But I could tell something had changed. The density and composition had changed radically. There was a wall of some sort, surrounding a small space. It was pitch black of course, so I couldn't see anything. But I could tell there was a room of some shape. I paced back and forth for a while trying to get a sense of the size. It seemed to be roughly cubic perhaps 8 paces wide and deep,and perhaps a bit longer tall? Say 3m x 3m x 5m. If I had to guess. I walked a few concentric circles of increasing diameters around the room, and again below it. But frankly, I was afraid of getting lost and not getting back to my body. There was a silver thread I could follow back to my body, and I began to return directly. I walked up toward the surface and came into the light 15m uphill from my body. I sank back in and opened my eyes.

  I blinked a couple of times and spoke, “well there IS something down there. I don't know how deep, another 8 or 12m? But there is a small bunker or room. About 3m x 3m x 5m in size. I think there is something inside, but I have no idea what. I looked around for other rooms but couldn't find them either. I didn't have a great sense of perspective but I could tell there was a hollow void, for the most part. Anyway, how long was I gone?”

  The sun had moved a bit lower on the horizon. Sunny responded, “Almost an hour. You seemed to meditate for 45 minutes then go still for 15 minutes. And great to hear about the room down below. We should be able to excavate it by tomorrow morning. I think I will stay up all night and work with the drones to get as far as we can. Go tell the rest at camp. Hopefully tomorrow morning we can see what we found!”

  I gave Sunny a smile, and nodded. “Sounds good. I will return and see you in the morning!” I fired up my jetpack, signaled to my escorts and returned to the campsite. The flight was easy and the lowering sun bathed the foothills and gully in glowing reds and yellows. The desert has a breathtaking beauty all to itself. Miles and Estéril, Alexandria and Molly were setting up for dinner. I landed, and managed not to fall down or stumble, too badly. I joined them around the communal fire pit. I quickly filled them in with the exciting news and let them know that hopefully we can peek inside tomorrow morning. They invited me to dinner, as usual, and I declined as usual. This time I had a real excuse. That much out of body travel without much practice left me exhausted. I could play with drones and machines all day, but a premonition, out of body experience, or aura reading would tucker me right out. I left the campfire and headed back to my castle in the sky. Or at least my hammock in a head. I flopped through the hatch and managed to strip my armor off before I drifted off to sleep.