The princess told me that in her previous talks with her brother that they’d heard rumors that the countries to the east and beyond the Northridge mountains were forming an alliance. The eastern coastal countries were the Principality of Kokoli, Yliasi, Jalagrorun, and the Maxorian Theocrasy.

A map of the known world, if you're interested.

The Northridge mountain range created a natural border between the Fangwell Empire and countries to the north, acting almost like massive fortress walls. Kokoli was positioned at the southern edge of the range and was the first of the eastern countries with access to Fangwell without having to worry about those walls.

I believed the former Auto-Knight Number 19, Kalua, was originally from a mountainous tree village in Kokoli while Number 18, Alika, was a soldier for their southern neighbor Yliasi. Princess Relena explained that the rumor mentioned that Kokoli and Yliasi had already formed an alliance and were working on construction of a joint fortress outpost. The base should be positioned somewhere in the Northridge mountains and could be a forward operation post.

The two countries were both in easy reach from Trone, and were actually closer than Trone was to the Capital. Supposedly, they were both also trying to get Jalagrorun in on their plans but it was yet undecided.

I asked about the Maxorian Theocrasy, the southernmost of the eastern countries, but Princess Relena wasn’t worried about them. She said that the Maxorians were a bit fanatical in their worship of the Sea God Maxoria. They would remain neutral in all things unless their god commanded them.

“Any chance this god could issue such a command?” I asked. While an atheist in my previous life, I had no idea if gods were actually real in this world.

“Who knows?” she shrugged, “but I doubt it. They say that Maxoria retreated to the deepest parts of the ocean searching for his son and his followers on land are all waiting for his return. They don’t take an active role in world affairs these days. Mostly they just run pancake dinners to draw people in and rent out their large gathering halls for parties and stuff.”

“Huh.”

“Yeah.”

“That’s um... Okay yeah, so these are some ideas I had for your new body.”

I pulled my sketches out of storage and laid them out on the desk. Surprisingly, the princess didn’t have much by way of requests for her new body. On the surface, she just wanted something that looked as close as possible to her original body. I’d be able to use gold wire for her hair and she told me about a crimson colored metal called blood steel that she wanted for her armor plating— I’d have to research where to find any though and while she knew about it, she had no clue how to make it or where to get any. Which I supposed was fitting of her station.

I was at a loss of what sort of weapons would be proper to install in her. As a princess, it didn’t really make sense to include any weapons at all really so instead I decided to try to optimize her for magic replication. I also insisted on including an illusion system that would let her use [cloak()] as well as an internal shield generator.

Once I got the designs approved, I had Ratchet and Rom get started on the production. Thanks to my raid of The Factory, I had loads of Automata parts now as well as entire bodies that I could scrap for parts or use as stock. I had a couple of guys that would love to have some stock bodies so I called JaffMeern to my shop.

They had been busy helping out where they could, but they tended to be pretty clumsy and were often the cause of more problems than they solved. Their constant arguing and fighting for control of the body didn’t lend themselves for precision work. Even basic smashy-smash type work took longer than you’d think since they kept fighting about it.

“Um... hey doc. Ohfer, he’s not a doctor! Oh shut up, it fits donit?”

I looked up from a work table where I’d laid out two stock heavy-labor class Automata bodies. JaffMeern had ducked his head into the shop and was trying not to knock anything over, which I appreciated. While I was gone, Ratchet had fitted them with hands. The hands were comically too small for their large frame and they kept fidgeting with them. Still, I was sure that it beat having hammer heads for hands.

“Come on in guys, I’ve got new bodies for you. They’re stock heavy-labor class frames but we can worry about upgrading them later. That okay with you?”

“Master Prime, you have no idea how okay I am with that... Heh, double for me. Let’s do this doc.”

I had built what was basically a car lift for working on IronHide so having JaffMeern lay down on it was perfect. I went through the now routine process of shutting down JaffMeern’s systems and preparing them for the operation. I wasn’t sure what I was going to find when I opened them up though.

I was relieved to find two soul cores inside the chest housing. I had several spare soul cores on hand now and could probably have worked out how to transfer their souls over to the new cores but I had no guarantees that they would retain their memories or personalities with the transfer. There was still so much that I didn’t know or understand about how the process worked.

While their body had two soul core ports, the rest of the mechanical organs were in the singular; most notably the brain module. So now the way they argued made sense. The transfer was otherwise pretty clean. For now, they’d have to be stock-model twins but we’d sort that out later.

Once they booted up and I walked them through their orientation exercises they headed back to the construction team working on the additions to the inn. They seemed pretty ecstatic to be fully in control of their own bodies but still argued with each other the whole time. I noticed that as they headed down the road to the inn, they were nearly rubbing shoulders; they walked so closely together.

The two said that I could keep the old body, though I didn’t know what I’d use it for so I tossed it into [Inventory]. The prince wanted me to head back to Trone to do some further investigation but I needed at least a night to myself to work on stuff.

Ratchet and Rom were conducting experiments with my memory magisteel cloth idea. If it worked, it could revolutionize the way that Automata skin armor was handled. Especially for the face. The bots that I’d built or upgraded to have faces like Elita and Shiro had a lot of overlapping plates that articulated to mimic facial expressions. If I could get it working, the memory cloth could function more like a flexible metal skin. Fingers crossed.

I put my tools away and started cleaning up around the shop when I got a system alert.

Software Upgrade Available

Developer Console ready to upgrade to version 3.4.98

Restart system to apply upgrade patch to firmware

“Eh?”

I still had no clue what triggered the updates. They felt like I was leveling up but then it also felt very much like some outside developer was just pushing updates my way whenever they felt like it. I mean, version 3.4.98? Why didn’t I get version 3.0.0? Maybe it was buggy and not ready for a production release...

My last update took me offline for several hours so I should at least expect as much this time around. I didn’t know what, if any, upgrades I’d be getting to my systems or new features, but I knew it could only help to run the upgrade before I headed back out to Trone, right?

I informed everyone that was in contact with any of my proxies, which at the moment was Shiro talking Alfred’s ear off about our trip to Trone and back. Sentinel hadn’t found Jackie or Prowl yet, so he came back to the shop and found a corner to sit down in.

Likewise, Ratchet found a comfortable spot and powered down while Rom made up a sign for the door that read: UPGRADING SYSTEMS, WILL BE OFFLINE FOR THE NEXT SEVERAL HOURS. DO NOT WORRY.

Once she powered down as well, I took a mental breath and triggered the upgrade process. Imagine having all of your senses shut down on you and the entirety of your consciousness focused on an infinite screen of swirling and shifting blues with friendly white letters in an impossibly tall font saying “Don’t Worry” and then in a smaller font “System updating, you may reboot several times during this process.”

As a former human, especially one used to working with computers, it’s not something you easily get used to. I watched my boot sequence scroll by a couple of times interspersed with “please wait” type messages.

Once the process completed and all of my boot-up system checks finished, I sat up from my work table and was greeted by a familiar system message.

Developer Console updated to version 3.4.98

Patch Notes:

Bug Fix - system no longer shuts down when processing cheese-based trigger word Bug Fix - head would explode if too much time was spent thinking about cheese Attribute Library installed Media Formatting - Unlocked Media Write - Unlocked Database Limit - increased from 1K -> 5K Inspect(search) - Unlocked Proxy Limit - Increased from 10 -> 25 Proxy Range - Increased from 100km -> 300km Health - Increased from 150 -> 300 Health Recovery - Increased from 1 per minute -> 1 per 30 seconds Mana Recovery - Increased from 1 per second -> 100 per second

I looked at the patch notes for a while, trying to parse what I was looking at. In particular, the bug fixes. As a former developer, I can tell you that it’s not unheard of to slip jokes into your change log, and I REALLY hoped that was the case regarding the cheese.

Granted, I hadn’t once thought about cheese since I started on this world, but now I was having a hard time not thinking about it while simultaneously worrying that my head would explode. THAT bug was fixed though, right? The patch notes said so... I wasn’t worried... much.

I brought up my Developer Console and searched through the available templates and libraries. Sure enough, there was a new one called “Attributes''. I looked through the template files and it looked like this library provided code snippets and APIs for crafting elemental spells that could be embedded into mana crystals.

I couldn’t be sure, but I thought that “media” referred to mana crystals. So with the Formatting and Writing functions I might be able to treat mana crystals like blank DVDs and rewrite them. I wondered if there was some way to weaponize that function.

Databases had do with how the [Inventory] spaces worked. They required a “Server” to be installed on an item and something like a user access key that was based on a person’s mana signature in order to access. With access credentials though, a person could transfer physical objects in and out of these databases. With my last update I gained the ability to create them and my database storage space of 1K translated to roughly one cubic meter of physical space. I still had no idea what the database storage stat was measuring. I assumed the K was for 1000 but nothing in my systems told me just what I had a thousand of.

The new update bumped me from 1K to 5K so I guessed that I could create [Inventory] spaces up to 5 cubic meters now. I still lacked the means to tell how large my personal [Inventory] space was though or what percentage of “Full” it was. I never knew when I’d reach the cap but I was sure I’d get a system error for it at some point.

It looked like some of my stats got a boost too. Nothing in regards to my strength, speed, or endurance though. Maybe those were strictly hardware based and I could change those depending on upgrading my physical body. Health went up though, which is weird since you’d think that was a hardware thing too.

I still didn’t understand how Health worked. Not long ago I nearly killed myself in a high-speed crash and my recovery didn’t seem to have anything to do with my health stat. I had to physically repair my damaged parts even though the stat had recovered. Sometimes I can take damage like losing an arm but the health stat doesn’t change. If I took a world of hurt and my health stat was down to 1, would stubbing my toe kill me?

It’s entirely possible that such things lose their meaning for an Automata or that “Health” is actually how close you are to giving up on life; your will to live or some such. That said, I don’t care how strong your will to live is, if you take a fatal shot then that’s it. Right? Game logic just wasn’t working here so I decided to put it aside for another day.

Mana recovery was also improved by quite a lot, though still not really where it should be for how much I expend to maintain all my proxies and such. I guess if I sat perfectly still and didn’t do anything I would get back up to my max mana of 5 Billion in about seven and a half months instead of the 63 and a half years it would have taken... Progress?

I rubbed my hands together thinking about my proxy upgrades though. With 25 proxy slots, I could run all of my current proxies at once and have slots open for experimental stuff like security cameras or communication devices. I could also, in theory, handle something MUCH bigger given that my largest proxy, IronHide, took up 5 slots. Sentinel and Ratchet both took up 3 slots each but they weren’t any bigger than a standard Automata but they were much more complex. It all had to do with how much focused concentration the proxy required to operate. I wondered if I could eventually reach a state where I could handle a proxy along the lines of the City-Former Metroplex, but just thinking about it now hurt my head.