We had set up camp like usual last night. Our 3 RV homes in the center, the trucks, engines and mining equipment in the middle, and the cargo boxes and buses forming a circular perimeter on the outside. I had just finished hanging our camouflage net so that it would cover the engineering trailer. Primarily, I liked to get it up right away because the shade was much appreciated when working outside, but no need to make it easy for any flyers to get too nosey from a distance. I was excited to finally work on the broken mining power armor, cleverly called ‘Power Construction Corp? Prospecting and Subsurface Mining Power Armor (PCC PSM-PA).’ I had picked it up for a song at the Neu Ca?on merchant and mercenary market. The poor thing had seen better days, when I reached out and touched it with my hand, and in my mind, I was able to tell the main and backup controller was totally fried: sensors, movement, comms, and environmentals were shot. The entire left side looked like it had been chewed on by some metal loving monster. Even the mining mod’s and attachments were slag, and worth only their material salvage. As I said, it was a work in progress.
“Sunny, have you seen my sonic multi-tool, I had it right here.” I yelled across the yard.
Sunny was setting up the crew for initial excavation, entrenchment, and mining. Both Sunny and the crew bear some explaining, however. ‘Little Sunny,’ was a full conversion mining Cyborg. 85% of his entire body had been replaced by machinery. Cybernetic components, and bio-synthetic systems gave him life, and enhanced abilities beyond anything he had before. Of course he had to indenture himself to a corp for 11 years to pay off the mods, but he was set for life, a very long life, as he liked to say. His systems were a bit more unusual, he had 2 treads instead of legs, making him shorter than most full conversion ‘borgs (and hence his appellation), and about even to most humans. But he was nearly as wide and deep as he was tall. He also had 4 arms, all with modular attachments for mining, and more. He kept multiple limbs on a platform behind his humanoid torso.
And at this moment he was smacking the side of one of our dumb mining drones. His ‘crew’ was composed of 4 synthetic bipedal mining machines. 2 were retrofitted cyborg based chassis in cyborg armor called miner-synths that I had created, and 2 ‘reconditioned’ Heavy Labor drones trained for mining and excavation that I had… liberated. We called them dumb drones, or labor drones if you are feeling less petty.
>>I know Big Fe, if someone heard what I was doing it would sound like a macabre necromancer playing with dead body parts. But to me, it was all unused technology. Any ‘ganic got augs in the first place, to be better than flesh, right? Well with my synths I was just removing all the flesh and ‘repurposing’ battlefield scrap, neh? >>
>> Bah, what do you know? You are a stack of servers in a trailer!>>
Walking slowly toward Sunny I shook my head and said, “You know Sunny, hitting the machine never makes it do what you want any faster. Right? What is going on?”
Grumbling under his breath Sunny said, “Yeah but it makes me feel better.” Taking a deep breath he continued. “This hunk of junk won't respond to my radio or voice commands, I got the other three ready to go, but this guy is toast.”
Looking over the machine for a moment, and using a quick telemechanic ping, I could tell that he had forgotten to initialize the machine for Excavation Prep. “Sunny, you need to initialize it into the right behavior template. It doesn't know what sort of activity you want it to do yet.”
“Well I didn't have to do that with the other big guy.” I quickly interrupted, “yeah because you had already used the other guy at the previous site. Remember? You said you didn't need both because the library was so small.”
“Harumph” Sunny snorted as he turned back to his preparations, after surreptitiously adjusting the physical control panel with his lower arm.
We had made our camp at the base of several steep foothills right next to another dried out riverbed. Sunny was going to send out the 4 miner-synths, who were running modified black market (or pirated Power Construction Corp? (PCC) if you want to be pedantic) mining and salvage skills packages. I was proud of that; the brute force retrofit had worked and been quite stable, the downside is they had no combat aptitude left. I had been able to completely retrofit the miner-synths with the full mining and heavy labor skills that we needed. My Squad Leader synthetic soldiers were quite a bit less… functional at times. I had several bugs I needed to stamp out.
But back to the mining crew, Sunny was instructing them to deploy and begin to scan with magnetometers and ground sonar to find open spaces or equipment that might indicate a hidden cache, pre-war military depot, farm equipment, or really anything worth recovering, salvaging and repairing. As the two cybernetic based miner-synths set off-- >>Big Fe, do I need a better name for those>> -- the PPC-d7 Heavy Labor Drones, at almost twice the size of a cyborg, began to prep the camp site for salvage, sorting, and collection.
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
I decided to return to my paying work. I kinda promised the head of BDwerks?, the slightly more mercantile arm of the black market, a working unmanned robot platform based on cybernetic systems, by the end of the season. I wouldn't call anything I created a drone, as there was no remote control or digital overwatch from the NET. This was far more versatile. But the idea of an autonomous laborer, skilled worker, and even a combat robot would hopefully encourage quite a few folks to fork over their hard earned credits, or gold, or whatever they had. The megacities back east are chock full of smart drones and killer robots, but they are always connected and managed by corpo, or government mainframes from the NET. Out here, we had no connectivity we didn't bring ourselves.
But, not only did I have no idea if I could actually figure out how to reverse engineer, isolate, and improve the entire combat profile, but I wasn't getting a salary, I only got a loan deferment for my massive ‘investment’. But I guess when you borrow from the guys who invented busting kneecaps, one shouldn't be too picky about loan flexibility.
Heading back to the engineering trailer, the Prospector mining power armor sat in bay 1 of the 8 bays in my top of the line mechanic’s dream. This was one of the fancy purchases I made with that loan. A fully self-contained portable field shop for engineering, drone, power armor, mech, and even limited cybernetic development and repairs. The trailer splits down the middle as it unfolds and houses all the tools, lifts, and infrastructure needed for field repairs and refits, or in my case, research and engineering. 4 bays ran along each side of the trailer when fully deployed.
I usually only worked on one side, with the Prospector power armor in bay 1, and my, currently broken, cybernetic based borg-synth squad leader in bay 2. Bay 3 and 4 were for any urgent repairs on equipment the camp needed me to look at. Of course, most of my work on the cyborg based synths was programming, AI training, and techno-therapy to create a stable, albeit smarter and more capable platform. The problem was, everything worked fine for 12 hours and then the leader synth overloaded and crashed, or worse. I laid my gloved hand on the machine and started with a quick telemechanic probe to make sure nothing had changed. I then sat in my comfortable hover chair and delved deeper into the bot’s mind.
Don’t get too excited, my chair hovered through the mighty powers of electro-magnetism, not magic or anti-grav, not yet at least. With the crazy alien things coming through the Doorways it's just a matter of time before we get antigrav, via magic or advanced tech.
Time flies when you are coding, and a metal hand on my shoulder broke me out of my lazer focus on squashing bugs. And a glance at the head-comp display in my left eye made me realize nearly 10 hours had passed by.
“Want to join the team for a campfire dinner.” Sunny asked hesitantly. His hulking frame, 4 arms, and treated locomotion on his lower body belied a gentle and downright friendly man who had been like an uncle to me my entire life. Sunny was close friends with my mom and dad before I was born and was always around when I grew up on the hidden underground base that shall not be named. You know the one that the Black Market found, retrofitted and ran their North American operations out of. Yeah that one.
Sunny was hired to continue the excavation and exploration even some 20 years after the ancient pre-war underground bunker/ manufacturing plant turned R&D lab had been discovered. They always had more tunnels and rooms that needed to be exhumed. He did such a fantastic job, he was able to pay off his cyborg body and rack up some serious upgrades before his indentured term was done. He left to strike out on his own doing salvage and mining, but when dad died, he came back and wouldn't leave my side. I also think he was missing his cyber-doc girlfriend/ and eventual wife, as well, the ever lovely and slightly creepy Alexandria. She was an incredibly beautiful and wealthy Black Market cyber-doc who had retired and joined Sunny in his babysitting quest. At least a few more women were in camp, but she was the furthest thing from a mother figure as anyone could be. And their “assistant” Molly was another strange one. Always silent, doing whatever Alexa, or Sunny, asked, instantly. She seemed preternaturally fixated on serving them no matter what. The few times I saw Molly wearing a Maid outfit inside their luxury Toyota-Daimler-Bilaindand Gecko class RV was enough to make me glad I didn't have to deal with dating, family, or attachments of any kind.
I removed my helmet which was sticky with sweat, even with the full environmental sleeve the Under All Inc. ? body armor provided. “Thanks Sunny, I think I will just eat in Gretta and turn in.”
Sunny lifted the armored faceplate covering his biological face and shook his metal head. He turned and looked toward my towering 11m beauty. “At least stay in the RV trailer we bought. It has everything you and 7 of your closest friends need out here, and yet you still stay in a hammock in your giant mech?”
I replied, “I don't need all that Sunny, I am more comfortable there anyway. So how did the search go today?”
“Meh, we got bupkis today, but that’s not unusual. We will have to continue to widen our search for a few more days before I call this area a bust, and another loss for your psychic record.“ He finished with a smile.
