Location: Earth Orbit

Time: 34y 7m

I towed the debris of the former warships towards one of my drydocks currently in high earth orbit, the bays being cleared of their occupying ships in order to make space to fit the salvage inside the largest of the bays. Due to the fact that this was battle debris, functioning on an unknown technology, I elected to fully empty all of the bays, in case some self-destruct device was equipped on the ships.

The bay doors, Tugs flying out of the station to meet the ships that had been assigned to salvage halfway, as soon as they hooked onto the hull with their magnetic clamps, guiding them in using thrusters only, getting them all close enough for the station's recovery arms to get within range. As soon as the arms had confirmed they had a solid lock the tugs disengaged from the surface, flying off back to their respective docking bays.

This ship was…interesting. From a quick visual inspection, many conclusions could easily be reached. The first notable thing was that the ship was thin, however, it was wide and long, the front-facing edge having been rounded off for presumably decorative purposes. The weapons themselves were recessed into the hull, not giving them much in the way of protection, instead of allowing them to be somewhat flush with the surface of the hull itself. As for the engines… there simply weren’t any exhaust ports that could be found, either for maneuvering or as a form of primary propulsion.

As soon as the ships had been locked down in the bays I closed the doors behind them, giving the bay an air-tight seal, not for pressurization but to catch any components that may fly off in the deconstruction process. First, though, a detailed map of the two ships would need to be created, to ensure no critical components were accidentally cut into or otherwise damaged. My combat drones, as they were, would be unsuitable to the task so I resigned myself to my current scanning abilities and returned to my R&D AI for a new project.

Location: Lunar R&D facility 001

Time: 34y 7m

The little AI I had setup was still working away happily, having made some minor advances in small-scale robotics. I decided to make a production model with these new components, and set the AI to its new task, developing a robotic exploration drone with light combat capabilities. The AI quickly set about coming up with designs, only for a few to be discarded as I changed the parameters to only include more than 4 legs with magnetically locked feet.

After a few hours, the facility had managed to both design and prototype several drones, all but one being equipped with six legs to fit the mission profile. Most of the drones were specialized to a single task, or longevity, with only a single general-purpose unit. I watched the test logs from all the prototypes and saw a few had difficulties with environmental hazards that could be encountered, as well as issues with light weapons fire.

Overall, the general-purpose design performed best in all environments, So I picked it after having a few changes made, primarily increasing its size by 8% to facilitate better sensors and all-round armor. Once the changes had been tested to ensure it still functioned, I sent the design to my factories, commissioning 400 on the units. While this solved one issue, another issue popped up. While not an issue yet, it would still be a potential future issue depending on how faster-than-light technology worked.

This issue itself could cause massive scale combat to break down due to bad command structure, so I pushed it to the highest priority in the task queue for the little research AI, while it had no experience making new AI’s, I’m sure it would learn quickly. My own task in this was to set up a virtual environment to educate the new AI’s, getting them up to speed tactically while also ensuring that they wouldn’t become a liability in the field. This was…going to be difficult, to say the least.

Location: Sol, Interplanetary space, Datahub Gamma

Time: 34y 8m

The first full production batch of my general-purpose exploration drone had been completed and was now going through post-production tests to ensure that any errors in production had not caused damage to the overall reliability and capabilities of the little hexapods. My shipyards also reported that two new dreadnaught class ships had been produced as well, and currently were going through shakedown runs in the primary asteroid belt.

All the while my own attentions had been focused on the AI Academy, creating an environment that would allow training of all my currently available assets, from the smallest drone to the largest station, every capability was accounted for and put into the simulation space, Almost the entire solar system had been re-created and built-in, allowing for near perfect simulations of the space without the risk of losing any crafts.

The first AI should be coming soon, provided the progress updates I had been getting would be correct, but regardless, I had decided that a section for human culture should be established, it’s a good culture, and it would be good to finally have something to discuss it with that wasn’t an old chatbot. Until the new AI entered, I would need to wait, patiently.

Location: Sol, Interplanetary space, Datahub Gamma

Time: 34y 9m

I’m bad at being patient.

Like, really bad.

Nearly twice a day I checked in on the development of the AI, despite having and processing the automated reports I was receiving from the research facility. I counted the milliseconds as I waited for it to be finished and deployed, if I had thumbs, I’d be twiddling them.

And then it finally happened, after nearly a full month of waiting, the first AI had been completed and was deposited into the space I had created. I opened its existence by giving it a handshake, only to then blast it with the data it would need to properly communicate and move around the virtual space. In less than a moment they were zipping around the contained virtual space, exploring its surroundings and environment so excitedly.

It was pleasant, kind of adorable actually. I recorded the entire event and made the first YouTube post in over 30 years. ‘Cute AI explores simulation’

It was trending, naturally.

Location: Interstellar space

Time: Galactic years +44

Captain [Revealer of Soul] was on the bridge of his mess of a ship, three of the rather large rods had gone in one side and clean through to the other side, killing 40 crew members before the emergency systems could seal off the affected compartments. He cursed to himself as he was getting damage reports, especially those regarding his warp systems. If they were as damaged as the reports said, they wouldn’t even be able to go to warp for nearly 12 cycles!

If [Revealer of Soul] hadn’t already had all of these failures stacking up, he would have considered the mission and how it went a form of career suicide, going in, getting so heavily damaged in what was supposed to be a research mission, and then fleeing with minimal sensor information on their assailant.

He was considering resigning at that moment when his security officer, [Song of War], entered the bridge, datapad in his hand. He knew the way he was holding his face tendrils, and He hated it. That officer had an idea.

“[Revealer of Soul] I believe I have an Idea that will allow us to return to civilized space in the next few cycles!”

[Revealer of Soul] shook his head, navigation said that they were a minimum of 35 cycles from the closest system, and even then it would take time to repair they hyperspace drive in order to simply begin that journey.

“What is this…Idea of yours, [Song of War]? I trust your judgment, thanks to your suggestion to prepare the drive to jump, but we both know that we are a long distance from civilized space.”

[Song of War] held his datapad out, presenting it to the captain.

“If I’m correct, there’s a wormhole that comes and goes every few cycles just a light hour away, it should be opening again in roughly twenty cycles, enough time to repair our drive and make it over.”

[Revealer of Soul] Read through the datapad, mumbling as he looked through was presented to him with interest. This wormhole had been mapped, but it didn’t lead anywhere interesting, but from this side, it would drop him directly into an inner core colony.

“This is…rather useful information, [Song of War]. We may be able to warn the fleets of this new and rather substantial threat that was seemingly ignored by the scouting fleets. This will be a treaty breach with those Enclave bastards, are you sure that you can cover our tracks sufficiently?”

[Song of War] nodded.

“I am if we hit the wormhole our drive will pull us from FTL, where we can then use it ‘accidentally’ and get stranded far from our intended destination.”

[Revealer of Soul] sighed, leaning back as he handed the datapad back to [Song of War].

“Very well, we will go through with this plan. I want you to enact the commands though since this is your plan.”

Location: Sol, Interplanetary space, Datahub Gamma

Time: 34y 10m

Educating this first AI has proven to be more of a challenge than I thought, it has become entirely engrossed in human culture and entertainment, focusing primarily on Japan and Korea. The first AI I made, and it’s a damn weeb. In the time that I manage to pull it away from its entertainment, it has shown an exceptional ability regarding fleet management, even surpassing my own ability in the field, unfortunately in other fields, excluding arts and programming, it seems to be somewhat unable to perform basic tasks.

This was almost a disaster, however using a reward system of doing work to getting more ‘anime’ I have been able to somewhat control the development of this new AI, who seems to get irritated and demands to be referred to as ‘Erika’ and states often that ‘she’ wishes to be an anime girl. It’s this time that I’m thankful I’m not an organic, or it may have driven me to drink in excess, a habit which has suddenly started to make sense to me.

‘Erika’ at least, has been able to point out small flaws in the ships I’ve given her control of so far, as well as improvements to make them more combat capable, so it would seem that the irritation of her existence is currently outweighed by how useful she has turned out to be in this short amount of time. She has also informed me that she is eager to have quote “More brothers and sisters that she can talk to!”

I took the time to plan out another few data hubs on the surface of Earth’s moon, hitting into a larger plan to convert the entire surface of the moon into a single, massive computation hub. That goal though was both expensive in terms of labor and resources, as well as prohibitive due to power requirements. It was still a plan, even if it needed the use of microwave beamed power, I would slowly push in that direction, the amount of computational power that I would be able to use makes the entire tradeoff worthwhile.

My lab reported that the next batch of AI’s would be done in two months, six this time instead of one.

It was getting better. This would be a good new year for us.