The drone wobbled a bit, as the nanoswarm finished its work. Not too many clean places down here yet, so I'd put it on the newly made feedstock storage bin while I built the frame.

It wasn't much to look at. A couple of propellors, some wings, an engine, and a decent camera and microphone. A small voice synthesizer rounded out the package.

The struggle for my life had taken a sharp turn for the better when I'd first built one of these. It was less of a game changer, and more of a table flipper.

That said... my not-so-nice neighbors to the east had more and better. I'd have to limit this drone's use to the lowest of altitudes until I could figure out some good electronic countermeasures. The situation called for more of a grasshopper than an Icarus.

A what now? I concentrated, wracking through my incomplete memories, chasing the name. Something about melting wings...

A spasm of electronic pain, as error notifications swam in front of my eyes. A sea of little black fishes posing as words, nibbling at my brain.

This was the price of corruption.

I had been damaged early on, before my defenses were in place. The structures that were effectively my brain were repairing themselves, but progress had been slow before my relocation, and I had no clue how my new digs would affect my healing process.

I did know that I had to be cautious. Excessive stress would cause the equivalent of seizures, or possibly make things worse. Essentially, my wounds were still freshly-stitched. Though it was against my nature, I had to take it easy.

Not too easy, mind you.

Aerial Surveillance Drone I has been constructed and added to your minion pool.

Bandwidth Occupied: 1

I hopped into the drone, spun up the propellers, and sent it out of the storm drain. While jumping into the nanoswarm to help it chew mud would have been a chore, this was a pure joy. The stationary take joy in mobility, when given the opportunity, and I was no different.

Someone had put a guard at the entrance, and I almost clocked the poor bastard in the face. He scrambled back and dropped his spear, landing on his ass and staring up at me in awe. Shouts rang from around the gully I'd emerged into, and I saw dirty, ragged people lining up on the sides to stare down at the drone with amazement. I did a slow loop around, checking them out, then rising up out of the gulley to the woods above. My flash mob scrambled back, chattering to each other and pointing.

Thanks to my translator program, I got the gist of it. Most of it was pretty much some variation of holy shit, it can fly! With about a ten percent side order of parents telling their kids to get away from the crazy thing, and five percent telling their buddy to go get Cade.

“Don't bother,” I said, zipping over to my five percenter. “I'll go to him.”

They got really quiet when I told them that in their own language, and I left before things got weirder.

Didn't stop them from following me of course.

We moved through the trees as I hunted for Cade. Tents studded the sides of the gully, built on the more level parts of the slope, and I approved. The Arcadians had built this with an eye to stealth, setting up so that you'd need to be right up on the crevice in order to see it. A higher perspective might help with that, but the trees were thick here... and mostly pines, which was good news. Winter would have stripped their leaf coverage, but evergreens ensured that they would have some concealment from flyers and spiers who made it up the neighboring hills.

It was good for now, but there were some serious flaws in the setup.

“This is going to work until the point it doesn't,” I said, landing next to Cade. The old man was sitting in a camp chair at a thin point in the trees, staring at the mountain through a pair of cracked binoculars. “Winter is coming.”

“I know,” he said. “By then you'll have either done your job, or it won't matter.”

“Warmth is the problem,” I said, easing the propellors to a stop as I rocked the tiny struts back and forth, making sure I wasn't caught on the underbrush. “And airflow. You'll need fires to survive the winter, but smoke is going to stand out, given the air currents off the mountain. It'll be visible for miles.”

“Unless you can do something about that. Like build a bunker, like we talked about.”

“It is looking like the best solution. But there's a fair amount of steps along that particular road. Speaking of that, I'll be opening some holes in the ground about two hundred meters northwest. Do me a favor and have your people do their business there from now on.”

“Do their business?” Cade lowered his binoculars and squinted at me from behind his cracked spectacles.

“Do number one, two, hell even three if you can scrape up the alcohol.” The honest puzzlement reminded me that the expressions I'd been programmed with had suffered a few centuries of disuse and mutation. “They're toilets. Latrines, more like, though I can easily print up some seats if you like.”

“Ah! Now you're talkin',” Cade smiled. “We've been diggin' cat holes, but it's work. Will there be, ah, any noticeable smells?”

“Some, but I can fix that easily enough later. The important thing is getting all that chemical waste down to me so I can process it into useful stuff. Like potassium nitrate, for example.”

Cade frowned. “Thought you cores could pretty much make anything from anything else?”

“We can, but, it's easier if it's halfway there already.” I could rearrange matter on the molecular level. But the process got way more efficient if I had the right kind of molecules to work with.

“All right. Well this'll save us work so I don't see people griping.” Cade settled back in his chair, and grimaced. “Gettin' old to be sleeping on the ground. My back's got knots that normally go on shoes. Don't suppose you got anything for that?”

“Not yet,” I admitted. “I didn't have much need for medical facilities when I was fighting the Jaspa. But now that you're here, that'll have to change. Think you can hold out a few weeks?”

“My head says yes, but my spine says no,” he sighed. “Living quarters come first though. My body's kept going seventy years, what's a month more?”

“A lifetime, if we're unlucky.” I thought about apologizing for my morbid turn of phrase, but something in me didn't like the notion. I wasn't sure why... perhaps another part of the grafted persona I'd been 'gifted.' So instead I asked him, “Did Hiram tell you what he wants me to do?”

“Why do you think I have Donna following him? He's restless. Got little to do. If she weren't watching him he'd be trying to sneak around those fields right now. I'm fine with it, you go and do your thing. Me, I'll watch up there.” He pointed up, up to a familiar peak.

“Not a bad idea,” I conceded. That was my old lair. There were at least two interested parties who were probably keeping a weather eye on that hole in the ground. Three, if the things below it still survived.

Our current location was a little too close for comfort, when you got down to it. But we hadn't had much choice. But all alternative choices were fled, and mourning what could have been was a road to madness.

“Go on,” he said, lifting the binoculars again. Blackened lenses, I saw with approval. Cutting down the chances of a flash at a bad time. “I've got things under control here. You do your thing, we got your back.”

And so I did.

West, flying low to the ground, sending squirrels scampering and birds flittering. I kept a wide berth from anything larger... fortunately the larger things seemed to be staying clear of their newly-added human neighbors.

No surprise there. Humans were deadly on a good day.

The trees thinned, and I started hitting clearings full of stumps. Piles of wood littered the ground, with bigger logs stripped of bark here and there. An empty cart sat off to one side, half-full. I stopped for a second, surprised at the waste... then I saw that one of its wheels was shattered, and it was propped up on a few loose logs. Too damaged to be worth taking in the retreat.

It wasn't long after when I left the forest behind, hitting a scrubland that had been stripped of most of its trees. Shortly after that, I found the first field.

It wasn't much to look at, maybe a half-acre of some sort of grain. My agricultural knowledge was lacking, but fortunately I had people for that. First things first, though.

The cabin beyond the field seemed empty, its crude door ajar. I circled slowly before coming in to peer through the smoke-hole in the roof... nope, nobody home.

Then I headed back to the crops, and took photos from every angle I could think of.

Poking around the area, I found three more fields, two smaller than the first, and the last one covering a full two acres. That one had a blockhouse instead of a cabin, and a few smaller garden plots. Potential there.

I had plenty of pictures. Now all I had to do was...

...the thought struck me that I didn't have any way to display those pictures to Hiram.

Easily fixed. I focused in the way that Argus had taught me, and visualized the object of my desire.

Schema Available: Display Monitor: A simple display, used for communication, disseminating propaganda, and placating the restless.

Would you like to create one display monitor for the cost of 3 feedstock?

A steal at the price! I hopped back to the builder swarm, and had them start installing one in my main chamber. Which reminded me, that I had the swarm sitting idle right now. Not so good... even if I had more time to work, I didn't have enough that I could afford to waste it.

So I moved them back up the storm drain, and started clearing out the muck up that way—

—and hit a windfall.

I wasn't sure what all the chemicals flashing across my swarm's ingestion stream were, but the feedstock estimate was rising fast. I pulled them off consumption and had them start on a new bin.

Then I frowned... or I would have, if I'd had a face.

Having only one swarm was too slow. Far too slow. I gave them instructions, going slowly and double-checking the programs to make sure I was doing it right. If I'd had Argus here I wouldn't have to do this, but...

Sorrow, then. His death gnawed at me still, would for quite a while to come, I knew. I threw myself into my work as a distraction, preparing the swarm to make three new brothers, then get back to work. Once I felt the program was well-made enough to avoid a gray-goo-apocalypse-style error, I set it in motion. Then I settled in to try and figure out how to get them to gnaw through the wall of muck without wasting feedstock or collapsing the hillside if they hit something load-bearing.

Only when I heard the sound of a fingernail tapping on glass, did I come to myself again. Hiram was there, with Donna in tow. Her torch flickered and guttered, and I made a mental note to put some damn lights in here.

A low-priority note, mind. I could see just fine without them, and the place would need a lot more fixing up before it was good for sunday socials.

“Your timing's good, I just finished the scouting run,” I lied. How long had I been busy with my programs and swarming? An hour or two? One and forty, my machine-memory whispered to me.

Hiram nodded, his beard a-waggling. “What have you found?”

I brought the monitor to life—

—and Donna screamed and leaped back, whipping out a knife.

There was a pause.

I cleared my throat.

Donna glanced around, looked sheepish, and stowed the knife.

Hiram, for his part, stayed stock-still throughout, though his eyes were wide. “I've heard of such things,” he said, a faint strain to his tone. “I had not thought to see them.”

I smiled, faceless, and started my slideshow.

They forgot their fear, crowding in close enough that a frantic mother of a bygone age might have scolded them for eyestrain. I didn't care. I could make them glasses if it came down to it. Couldn't I?

Insufficient Subroutines for this task!

Requirements: Fabrication 1, Recovery 1

That was a bizarre mix. But then, my entire technological advancement schema was a mix of hardcoded recipes, artificial limitations, and random patches from Juno.

It did make sense that I would have to have something in the medical tree before I could go making glasses. I needed some form of diagnosis before I could grind the lenses appropriately.

My train of thought got derailed to tracks less ocular when Hiram announced “This is good, but not enough. I need to see these fields from more angles. And I want a closer look at those herb gardens.”

“You're in luck. I left the drone in the area, and we should have enough daylight left to get you some Pulitzer-worthy shots. Hell, I can do full video and dolby-surround-sound if that tickles your fancy.”

Hiram got a pained look. “I understood some of that.”

“Easier to show than tell,” I said, and hopped back into the drone.

Then I paused.

In the hour plus that I'd been gone, something had happened.

Not here, not in this little scrubland rise. The fields blew in the wind, unchanging.

But to the south, rose a plume of smoke, black and thick and ugly.

I knew what smoke like that portended.

“Hiram, I'm afraid you're going to have to wait.” I told him.

“What has happened? Has something changed?”

“It's war. War never changes...”