4 Chapter 4: Totally Legitimate Salvage

I had my little reminder about the strength and temperance of mysteriously powerful aliens. Unlike the Fahrkan, the things in the Star Trek universe were very often far more malicious, when they weren't outright capricious. Q being the most worrisome example. I had to simply hope that by avoiding making ripples that were too large, I could avoid his attention. A good part of that was by limiting myself the timeframe before the UFP existed. I never really cared for the Enterprise series when it aired, but the fact of the matter was that unless I suddenly became a Planetary Annihilation Commander or a genuine Planeswalker, I'd have to wait for at least a decade or two before things like replicators were comprehensible enough for me to even hope to provide the power to operate them.

No, my purpose here was far more limited in scope. Which would be how I found myself standing amongst the wreckage of the colony that was built from the hull of the SS Conestoga. On Terra Nova. One of if not the absolute first extrasolar colonies of humanity. `I'd completely forgotten the name of the ship before coming here -- I certainly didn't have any kind of eidetic or flawless memory. At best I could sort of scry areas from within the inter-universal non-space, an ability I planned to exploit to no end, even if it did take time and require me to know what I was looking for along with a general sort of "where". The Conestoga carried a number of rather useful technologies, for my purposes, along with instructional materials on how to maintain and even them in the ship's fabrication equipment-slash-machine shop. Even better, that data was stored in independently backed up data storage solutions that operated on solar charges. To the crew of the Enterprise, when they arrived here, this information was at best useful for historical purposes. But for me, it was a godsend. Some of this stuff, I'd likely never get much use out of. The warpdrive for example could manage roughly 1.5x the speed of light. More interesting for my purposes was the gravity plating and the security particle guns. There was even a pistol that still held the capacity for ten or fifteen shots. It would take a month of solar panel charging for it to recover the ability for a single additional shot. Fusion reactors … well, I was sure it was something I could trade someone for. The chemical formulation and synthesis specifications for room temperature superconductors, on the other hand, was something I could get a great deal of mileage out of fairly quickly.

I didn't really understand a damned bit of the materials my plucky if personality-less AI was downloading for me -- all of it relatively unencrypted, as it was meant to be accessible, and reproduced with a bare minimum of equipment necessary because nine year one way trip colony -- but the cyberbrain firmware I'd gained was at least making that data accessible to me consciously, so that I could at least fake understanding with the equivalent of instant rote memorization. At least, the bits of it that I could retrieve from the secondary dataslate I still had on my person, as I wasn't willing to risk overloading my actual brainmeats with the amount of data I was extracting from these systems.

I was very carefully only making copies of information beyond the one extraneous particle pistol I was stealing, however, and not looking to take anything more. Even if I could carry some of the data storage devices, they honestly weren't as effective as what I could already access. One more hop to make here and then I could get out of Q central hopefully without tripping any flags.

Hopping sideways -- stepping out and back into the same reality I'd just left -- was always an exercise in patting one's head and rubbing one's stomach in circles. It required looking left and right at the same time, as it were. Easier to do with less distance involved, but in this case the distance was a couple dozen lightyears. I could only pull it off because I knew exactly what to look for -- the automated drydock station run by cyberzombies. This would be another run and pump for data only. Much as I'd like to get ahold of industrial replicators there was simply no way I could possibly build them myself, yet. Let alone operate them -- the sheer data involved in the materials involved was simply beyond my ken.

I didn't have as much time as I would've liked at this stop; the security systems of the automated station were meant to prevent intruders from accessing the systems. I had an easier go of it due to being able to simply step into the facility where the comatose bodies were kept, and connecting to the systems through my neural implant was a work of seconds -- thanks to the data retrieval AI. I still only had a minute or two to extract the data from the station, which meant that I barely had long enough to get the schematics for the replicators themselves and the scanning equipment -- there would be no time to pull down the multitude of templates it had on file. Not that even with the data storage I had on hand I could even attempt to do so. Quadrillions of yottabytes of data was a total that was immensely beyond my ability to simply carry around.

The alarms started blaring even as I vanished from this reality back to my postapocalypse safehouse. The trip to and from the far edges of my range always left me gasping for breath, even if the phenomenon was probably psychosomatic -- it wasn't something I could do freely. And even as early in the timeline of the setting as it was as I'd travelled to it, I had been pushing my limits to get there.

I almost had a minor panic attack as I thought about the question of whether or not a member of the Q Continuum or "Ascended Beings Club" could actually follow me outside of their reality, and I hunkered down to trying to sense in the un-nothingness for other beings, as utterly futile as that attempt was; I had no way of knowing if I was just imagining that there was nothing there, or if there truly wasn't actually anything out there. I still kept at it for about twenty minutes more before the sheer futility of my actions (or, rather, inactions) got to me and I decided to just man up on it. If they'd really had a problem with what I'd done there, they would've been easily able to stop me.

But I sure as hell wasn't planning on going back to that place unless I absolutely had to.

Now, a more inquisitive sort of person might wonder what, exactly, I was planning to do with all of the material and information I'd thus far acquired -- seeing as I had no means of actually using any of it just yet. Such a person would be fairly wise. But that was where the next step in my little misadventures would come into play, and on this step I was fairly confident I could be somewhat more relaxed about it all, seeing as I had no eldritch fleshgods or atemporal extradimensional consciousnesses to worry about lurking around in the corners. No, all I had to worry about in my next little trip along the way to acquiring fame fortune and unlimited power was being shot by robot cowboys with delusions of consciousness.

Like a mirror disintigrating, the zombie apocalypse reality shattered around me -- or maybe I shattered within it -- and a short bit of holding my breath later, I found myself standing in a concrete bunker style of facility in exceptionally poor and intermittent lighting, facing a long-malfunctioning wraparound digital display that was stuck on a corporate logo. If you could even call giant orange letters reading "DELOS" on a white background a corporate logo.

The area I'd stepped into was one I had scryed -- remote-viewed? Terminology. Ugh. -- to be essentially unpopulated. What I had not anticipated was the sickly sweet smell of sewage and soupifying flesh. Should've expected it considering how close the Westworld Universe was to the generic zombie apocalypse, though.

It took a number of very small hops to get together everything I was looking for in this long-abandoned facility, even if it wasn't everything I might've wanted. I probably could've done this part much more simply, but I had utterly no way of knowing what would actually work for it and what would not, so I had to take my chances. This was the next real step in my plans for establishing a powerbase -- finding a workaround for my transit limitations. Having to constantly be constrained to only that which I could actually carry was going to be immensely tedious beyond description.

So I decided that I would find a way to cheat. If I was limited to only that which I could carry and myself, then I could simply make myself bigger. Ergo the focus on the Fullmetal Alchemist automail, and the real reason I absconded with the organic hull technology of the SeaQuest. Oh, I probably didn't need the "bigger me" to actually be biological as well as an extension of my soul -- but it sure as hell couldn't hurt and I wasn't going to take my chances unless I absolutely had to. It had taken me two full weeks of hopping back and forth between the zombie apocalypse world, various Altered Carbon Universe colony worlds, and the DELOS facility to get everything I needed set up for "phase two" of my 'grand master plan', but I'd managed it nonetheless. Doing it while simultaneously shutting down all mesh networking and monitoring to the corners of the DELOS facility I'd actually be using was a pain, but a necessary one as I couldn't be certain how competent Delores et al. would be in finding me down here and I'd only get one shot at this.

The other thing that was useful about the DELOS facility was that I could actually construct fully trustworthy surgeons here, if only those using skills I myself or the surgeons of this world already knew. Which was how I found myself staring at a bone-white Host looking for all the world like a paper mache musculoskeletal anatomy model holding a scalpel while I was strapped down onto my stomach. This was going to be painful. Why did so many of my plans involve inflicting egregious amounts of pain on myself? Oh, right. Desperation and fear.

I bit down on the leather-wrapped dowel that I had placed in my own mouth while using my implant to direct the surgeon Host in the task of installing the new automail sockets along my spine. Designing them using the Host tissue with the goal of having them appear to be benign precancerous tumors to anyone who didn't know what they were looking at -- though the regularity involved would be suspicious to say the least -- was the best I could do with the things, given what I needed them to do.

Even as I was being operated upon, the last of the large-scale Host bioprinters in the DELOS facility that was actually operational (in no small part thanks to my using scavenged schematics from the mesh systems they were stored upon) was executing the program of printing out possibly one of the largest objects it had ever actually constructed. Not so much an animal as an egg made of the SeaQuest hull organism -- itself being reproduced from a "slurry" in lieu of the usual biomimetic plastic that the printers normally worked with, where the regular mimetic plastic "bones" weren't in place. Ironically, after doing a little digging on the issue, I probably could have used the Westworld Hosts for this transit vessel I was making for myself. Turns out the stuff is a lot more organic than I'd picked up from the TV show. Or maybe it was shown and I just forgot about it? Either way -- the stuff was probably closer to plant than animal, really, but the biomimetic plastic was something that should genuinely be rated as "living plastic". It breathed, it metabolized, it could to a limited extent self-repair. Incredible stuff. And I was making a giant egg-shaped boat out of it. Well, if you could call something a boat if it wouldn't float, had no engines -- let alone a powersource, outside of the digestive and respiratory systems which didn't really bear too much thinking about (if pushed, it could extend a root system out to gather nutrients (well, it would be better described as a mycelium network, but meh, they were roots) and was basically just an egg with a door, with a throne room, a bed, and a larger room with webbed shelving -- all of which was in its own creepy way actually a living thing.

The goal -slash- plan here was to have a couple of "worker" Hosts load up the thing with components necessary to operate and assemble a Host fabricator on wherever I was going to wind up. And then … minions! Every god-emperor needs minions. Plus, I needed someone to do dangerous research that wasn't me. So subsapient biorobots is kind of a great option there. Score.

The worst part about automail is that it requires the patient to be conscious during installation. Oh, there are a few parts that can be done while the patient is unconscious, or at least under local anesthesia -- but when it comes to properly linking up nerves and the like, the patient simply must be conscious. You'd think that this could be overcome with sophisticated scanning techniques and EEG scanners, but no -- since automail surgery involves the soul as much as the body, it requires the patient to be aware of the changes being made. And those changes are without hesitation very painful. The same process I'd gone through once before -- for my eye -- I now had to repeat another twelve times. I blacked out repeatedly from the pain. The only thing that kept me going was the knowledge that once this was done, I would be done with the process permanently.

That didn't stop me from trying anything and everything I could think of with the Host surgeon to reduce or mitigate the pain of the process. I probably succeeded a little -- if nothing else, by avoiding errors and having greater precision thus allowing smaller individual changes to greater effect -- but given that I had nothing to compare it to, I wouldn't know.

The whole process took no less than six days. My jump-egg had been completed for two. Everything I'd need had been fully stored away, even.

Hooking myself into the Egg was a surreal experience. The throne had been designed such that the connector sockets in my back would be receivers to small "snake" like probes that would push gently into place -- no point risking harming someone else if they attempted to sit in the control throne themselves. Well. "Control throne" is kind of grandiose a term for something that barely had a proper sense of proprioception and heat detection, along with a few rudimentary photoreceptors. Oh, there were cameras, mind you, but those were barely anything more than dumb security cameras with wireless feeds I could use the cyberbrain firmware to interface with. They didn't even connect to each other, let alone give information about the interior of the egg.

Moment of truth time. I reached out with all of myself, feeling as I could through the living ship I had created, and slid the misty weave of reality around myself.

It felt like trying to push a boulder uphill.

I reached the fenced off area behind my safehouse in the zombie apocalypse universe, and I felt the eggship dying around me. This told me two things. One: the energy or perhaps efforts requirements for transit increase with the volume transited. Two: my plan had worked. I could in fact make larger mass transits.

As I scrambled to get nutrients into the vessel, pushing/extruding the root network while directing a Host to dump oatmeal and water into the digestive tanks -- not the ideal feed, but the best I really had on hand considerin the proper slurry would take far too long to produce enough of -- I found myself having to repress the urge to laugh with near megalomaniacal hysteria. This was going to work. I was going to be able to pull this off. It was only a matter of time -- barring the unforeseeable -- before I would be safe enough to build my own little empire in the multiverse. After all; what's the point of having power like this if you don't use it to its fullest? Oh, sure, you could wander aimlessly throughout the universe accruing personal power, but what's the point of that if you don't use it? If you don't actually build something? Make the cosmos a slightly better place for your having been in it?

Other folks might have different answers. But this was going to be mine. Is it really megalomania if you are genuinely capable of being an immortal god-emperor and bestow untold wisdom unto the masses?