Location: Sol, Earth, Former US Capital

Time: 34y 11m

I’d been informed that the cleanup efforts in the city ‘Washington D.C.’ Had been completed, so I’d shifted my attention down to check out the region, see exactly how damaged everything was. I doubted that there would be much left, and my suspicions turned out to be correct. There was barely even rubble left after the cleanup efforts, every landmark had been obliterated beyond recognition, and there were no undamaged structures. Destruction had been total.

I redirected my drones to the region, having them create detailed maps of the post-cleanup landscape for future educational purposes. I could rebuild them, but it felt like doing that would be disrespectful to all the humans who had died in places like this, having been murdered in the millions at a time.

I was considering what to do with the region if monuments or a simple pathway with plaques would do when I got a notification. If this wasn’t odd enough on its own, the contents of it made it even more so. If the report was right, Erika suffered a cascading failure, and automatically shut down to preserve data integrity.

This was...Concerning. Erika’s code shouldn’t have had issues large enough to cause this and should have been able to recover on their own regardless. I started the process to begin merging Erika’s code back to the lunar data center for low latency review, sending the command through my network until it reached the laser communication array in high Earth orbit, beaming the command off while maintaining a lock for communications.

I’d need to work on this, if this issue was present in other systems, it could fail at the drop of a hat in combat, or worse, manufacturing. A disaster in managing the nuclear forges could easily spiral out of control. If something like that happened it would be hell on earth, well, in space I suppose.

Location: Sol, Luna, Lunar research facility 002

Time: 34y 11m

I shifted my main processes towards the moon as the uplink started to shift the data from Erika to the newest research facility, this one currently under my direct supervision until I could find the issue with both Erika as well as the Research AI in facility 001. The link, only having just started the download, quickly started populating the servers in the facility, sorting the incoming data automatically.

After about 7 hours the download had been completed, and the code had been decompiled, Ready to be analyzed along with the logs just before Erika shut down. The first thing I set to do was...reproducing the issue, which took all of three minutes as I simulated the data stream she was getting, only for her to fail in the same manner. This was going to be easier than I thought!

Location: Sol, Luna, Lunar research facility 002

Time 34y, 12m

Easy. My. Ass.

The first step itself was trivial, however, once I got into the code itself and started trying to fix the cause, it caused four issues for every single one that I fixed. It took weeks just to fix all of the original bugs, and weeks further to patch out the new bugs that the first round of patches caused. I got a few updates regarding the new Dreadnought class ships and noted that despite their small size, the results were favorable, and durability was exceptional. I sent some instructions back to replace the small generation 1 gun-sticks with this new class, and to recycle the older crafts in orbit of Mars.

Turning my attention back to Erika, I once again recompiled her code to give it the routine data injects, so I could see what fucks up this time, despite the code supposedly not having any flaws. It came back as a pleasant surprise when her code didn’t crash and burn this time, and instead responded to the incoming data somewhat normally, there were deviations from expected responses due to her preferences, but overall it was acceptable.

I set her back up in a simulated environment and set her up to boot. I got an estimation that it would take roughly a day for her booting to complete, and decided to turn my attentions to my industrial base, performing checks to make sure that none of the issues I patched out were present.

Starting with my 0g nuclear refineries, I went through and combed their code, finding a few entries that could potentially cause issues in the future. I moved onto the freighters, mining drones, and the solar charging arrays, all finding similar, small issues.

It seems that the more complex the code was, the more and more major flaws I would find in said code, that R&D AI needed work.

Location: Sol, Luna, Lunar research facility 001

Time: 35y 2m

It took a while but I’m pretty sure that I got the stupid AI fixed, and finally re-deployed both it and Erika, sending Erika back where she was before as I sent the research AI in for testing until it was done with the next batch of the AI’s, I’d have it locked down. I really don’t want to go through and loose another two months because of bugs.

Erika went back to training her ships networks to anticipate enemy tactics and to try and make a profile for enemies that they encountered, this was apparently part of her tactic to know the enemy better than they due, piggybacking themselves on data mined from the Lunar beacon. The beacon itself was still in use, mostly as I went through first mapping, then crawling every corner of the network I could find. The data that I’ve gathered so far isn’t useful on its own, and I haven’t yet found the alien version of Wikipedia where I can get FTL, but it is still mildly useful.

One of many things I did get the information for though, was how to construct the FTL communications beacons, as well as how to uplink to a political entity known as ‘The Department’ which, if my information is correct, investigates war crimes and major violations of interstellar accords. Like for example, exterminating a sentient species. Like Humans.

The beacon itself contained technology that I could replicate, just not at scale, I had a prototype being constructed in the orbit of Jupiter, piggybacking itself off of the antimatter harvesting and research facility, as it seemed to require antimatter, for a reason I have yet to find in the databases.

Whatever the reason was, I’d follow the blueprints I had, and I’d contact this Department to hopefully gain assistance. This stupid ass empire is gonna need to prepare themselves because they are gonna get so fucking freed. Democracy, fuck yeah.