I came across a dilemma as I sat there in the trench, the towering pile of boxy valuables my courier bots had unloaded from my drop pod lying in the hardened mud. I couldn’t take everything with me.

Certainly, I could begin by equipping a bunch of the modules to my building-sized, 6 legged mechanical body, but just the resource and component cubes alone numbered a few hundred, not to mention all the missiles and industrial equipment I was saddled with. The biggest offender of the bunch was the 8x4x4 slot , which, while my singular large courier could carry it given it was the one who brought the block down in the first place, would take up a massive portion of its space. I did actually try to stick it vertically on the exposed main cargo bay of the courier, but it didn’t lock in place like a normal item put into inventory, and it wobbled with the slightest touch.

“The trait on your bot lets you equip most modules to it, including industrial equipment, “ a gruff male voice said in my mind, and on my HUD. The tutorial would occasionally prod me if I appeared to be confused, or in this case, doing something strange. It was a pretty good advisor with my limited experience with it so far, but it occasionally reverted to stock responses like right now.

“Tutorial, are you sapient?” I asked in my mind. I had enabled an option called [Vocal Segmentation], which apparently prevented my actual thoughts from being interpreted as commands or interactions with the system. It was a bit strange, talking using a separate mental voice, but it seemed like a really useful feature.

“The Federation prohibits the usage of Sapient AIs in armed conflict. They send biological grunts like you instead. I’m what you’d call a limited AI; I take input from you and your sensors, look up a response in a database, and give the best answer I can find. As a User, you have the ability to search this database yourself or view my current table of highest probability responses. Use the [System Manual] command word to search for these options yourself.”

Pretty interesting stuff, but I didn’t want to go down the nitty-gritty computer path right now. My originally 31-hour mission timer only read ; the team of couriers taking around a quarter of an hour to fully unload the pod. It was really a massive amount of stuff; the pile halfway as tall as I was and far heavier.

Apparently, each slot was a cube 1.1 meters along each edge, including 5 cm on each side as smart packaging. I wasn’t sure what that material was made of, but it was certainly physically impressive. It was extremely durable, shock resistant, insulating, capable of self-repair, and could be recycled using modules called repackagers. The couriers actually had these built into them, as I learned when I looked at the piles of discarded packaging from my current group of robots and found the [Recycle] option. The various couriers who were not unloading from the pod at that point turned and started swallowing up the piles. Throughout the process, new grey 1 slot boxes were dropped out and collected with the rest of the pile.

I consulted the tutorial on my dilemma, to which it noted a significant portion of the supplies given to me were materials and machines meant to set up a resource extraction and assembly facility. These included resource cubes of steel rods, cabling, folded carbon sheets, and more. If I had time, I could use these materials to create an exponentially expanding war materiel factory that could churn out an army of combat robots sourced from locally extracted resources. The hard time limit however meant that those resources would likely only be destined for the robots themselves. I could assemble small and medium bots out of the more finished components that were packed with me in a relatively short time, but to use the simple refined materials would require both setting up the and hours of processing.

After another minute of deliberation, I decided to install the manufacturing module onto the large courier, and load it and another medium courier with basic materials to process into components while we moved. The installation process was quite simple; I used the [Interact] button on the courier, found a section on its info screen near the bottom labeled , and looked through the rows of various pre-installed items until I found an empty row with a plus next to it that wasn’t greyed out. This minimized the window, and I looked at the packaged machine I set on the ground which was now highlighted yellow instead of white. The button also changed to [Install].

The robot then trundled over, legs extended so its body hovered over the module. Smaller grabbers on its bottom lined up the big box with a rectangular hole that had appeared on its bottom, and it laid down on the ground. The top inventory space had been pushed over to the side, now more of a long rectangular strip than a squarish space. A large black plate with grills took up the occupied space and spat out a few cubes of packaging from the side into the inventory.

A new production interface had been added to my hud, listing various categories of items. I didn’t know much or anything at all really about robot engineering, so I just pressed the [Produce Spare Parts] button and clicked another to repeat forever. The large courier went off and loaded its inventory with items before sitting down, whirring. A different tab included finished robots I could currently produce. I selected one of each, some options disappearing as I went down the list. A bunch of items were highlighted in the pile, which I wasn’t sure how to load into myself or where to store. There was however a handy [Fetch All] button that automatically had my robots grab the blocks for me.

After a bit more shuffling around, they finished their task and huddled up in front of me. Not sure what to do, I queried the tutorial.

“Bots can be stuck directly onto your frame, or in module slots. The ones randomly hanging off you will just be there for the ride, but those in actual module slots will give all the robot’s functionality to you, including processing modules, storage, weapons etcetera.”

So the greyish boxes displayed on my body window were my module slots, all located on my rear. The bots all clustered up together observed expectantly as I stared back front-first, looking down upon them. I gave a mental sigh of acquiescence and turned around, squatting down on my six legs to let the gaggle of couriers stick themselves where they wished. They latched on, and I could feel shaking and squirming along my backside as they hooked up to my internal logistics system. Some internal shuddering later, one of the large armor plates on my right flank raised and ejected a 3x2x1 box. I unpacked it to reveal a small combat robot that looked almost exactly like me, a six-legged mechanical strider labeled a

“You are my first-born son. I shall name you Timothy, “ I said in my mind, putting on my best impression of a kingly, royal accent. It wasn’t very good.

[ redesignated as . Issue command word [Save] to save changes or [Cancel] to revert], a system dialogue box said.

“[Save]” I replied. I hoped I wouldn’t get too attached to him, given how disposable Federation forces appeared. The lack of an actual mind in the little drone helped in that regard, though I was well aware of how my human psyche had the tendency to bond literally any object or even concept if lonely enough. I supposed I could always go the goldfish route and get a Timothy II if I was down over the loss. Beyond that, though, Timothy’s arrival brought some interesting changes to the HUD, namely on my minimap in the top right corner.

The box had originally displayed a colored contour map of the area around me, with various squares, triangles, and rectangles indicating the location of different objects. Those were still there, but the lightly colored circle taking up a good portion of the middle of the map now contained an even brighter portion extended along the impact trench. Working on a hunch, I picked up my little scout drone with a foreleg and sat him on my head, upon which the bright area extended to cover most of the map, distorting in some places due to the terrain blocking line-of-sight. Away from our cluster of green markers was a yellow one sitting on a hill. An ear icon sat above its head which I selected as I turned to face in that direction.

“-yes, the damn robot just spat out a box. Did you see how big it was? Bigger than one of my , that’s for sure. You wanna know how I can tell? Half my herd got fucking annihilated and are dead on the field! I understand your distress sir, but is it attacking or consuming the cattle? This is important information -. Shit, it's looking directly at me.” The two voices said, in perfectly understandable speech. If I looked really closely I could see a tiny bit of movement on the tall hill more than a kilometer away.

“Your scout drone is currently hijacking the wireless transmissions of the target and feeding the output through a translation bank installed in your data package. As the target is currently performing reconnaissance for enemy forces, they are considered a limited combatant and no points will be penalized for their death. They are within main weapon range if you wish to attack, or alternatively, a tactical missile may be used to guarantee the kill.” The tutorial noted. My tactical missile launchers were still packaged in the pile though.

I raised my right foreleg, focusing on the slight divot in the side until I saw ARMED next to a box containing a railgun on my display. I carefully took aim, the holographic targeting line helping greatly in this regard. With a crack and tearing sound, paired with a bright flash of burning air, the 40mm ferromagnetic slug streaked across the field, passing well over the hill. I heard the shifting whine of the projectile above the rancher’s head through his phone, followed by a stream of panicked expletives as he finally reacted and stumbled off.

I disabled the signal interceptor with the map and set down my leg, letting go of the mental trigger. As the weapon disarmed and cooled off, I justified my decision to myself. The man was just a random civilian, angry at losing half his livelihood. He contacted authorities just like any normal person would in the situation, but I couldn’t let that continue. I doubted he would try again, his brush with hypersonic death an effective deterrent.

I did go over to the pile and equip a pair of launchers on my rear flanks though, assisted by the grabby parts of the multiple couriers still stuck on me, along with four packages of missiles. These were stashed in one of the more central medium couriers I decided to treat as my personal storage; the launchers coming pre-loaded with ordinance.

Another small robot had popped out of my side during this, a 4x2x1 that unpacked to be the same model of combat robot as the ones I had been initially provided; bipedal digitigrades who were essentially legs with a gun and sensors. They appeared quite agile, with powerful limbs and a squat, boxy main body that presumably held everything they needed to run, which in their case was energy cells, like the rest of the smalls. The mediums and larges took fuel cubes though, and I believed the packaged nuclear fuel rods were meant for me.

I ordered all the empty couriers to detach from my body and join the rest in collecting supplies. This mainly involved interacting with each bot hanging off my rear using panoramic view and clicking detach on the ones whose inventories were empty. Selecting the entire pile let me sort by category of item, which condensed everything into 2d pages of single slot items with their count indicated in their corner. I selected [Loot All] on the fuel, ammo, component, and weapons pages, watching the couriers rapidly collect large portions of the pile into their storages. I then selected some cubes of rarer sounding refined materials like titanium plates and solid blocks of synthetic gemstone, pressing the [Loot] button on their info screen that popped up.

Whatever was left I simply pressed [Loot All] on, my group fully loaded and ready to go. I had left on my mission, and it looked like I had a long way to go.