Loop 9 Year 2 Day 1

Today is the day after the bombs dropped. My mental age is at the point of almost being twice as old as my physical age. I am currently lamenting with Chelsea. She is sad about not being able to save her entire family. To be honest though, the part of her family I didn’t save would just cause the group a lot of problems.

I decide to spend most of my time with the group I saved. There are 46 of us. 20 men, and 26 women. That includes her sister’s baby girl though. With our numbers, we can hold a viable population. We have more than the required minimum to stop the level of inbreeding that would cause genetic disorders.

I set out a birth plan, and hide it. Chelsea has told me before that she would hate it if I were in power. It makes sense though. People in power almost always abuse it. In this situation, I am in complete power. Even though I hold the power over their lives, I make sure to downplay the entire situation.

I decide to start a voting system for the food. I made sure that it was ‘someone else’s idea’ though. We all put in our votes, and the correct food is prepared. We also start a form of government. We all cast our votes as to who should be in charge of the base. I am elected lead engineer. Over half the group wants me to be president, but I decline the offer. I want to appear as powerless as possible.

My friend Brandon is elected president. I let him know about most of the systems. Including the outside monitoring system. I show him the room with the supercomputer that harvests that data. The other supercomputers, including the monitor system for inside the base, are all past a secret doorway in my unlivable room.

He asks for the codes to the robots, but all I give him are the basic commands. There are two levels of control in the robots. One is ‘Obvious Control’. Obvious Control lets whoever is the leader of the bunker give commands to the robots.

The second level is ‘Shadow Control’. Shadow Control lets me give commands to the robots as long as it follows a certain key phrase. I had already programmed about a hundred phrases. He also asks to have control over the room touch pads. The touch pads are actually handprint scanners. At the same time as your hand is scanned there is a retina scan, and voice authorization scan.

Each person only needs to put their hand on the pad, look at the hole, and speak. He doesn’t completely trust me. He has me try to open each door. Although I did make it so I could go in any room, I didn’t just make it where I had to speak. I have to say a particular phrase.

After he is satisfied he goes about his duties of controlling the, what he decided to call, vault. Chelsea and I snuggle in her room. Several rooms are empty, and can only be opened by new people registering their hand/voice/eye prints. One of the empty rooms is keyed to me. I also have a regular room. Everyone gets one bedroom, even if they decide to share it with a spouse they have their own.

I have two other rooms though. One is just the science room. At least everyone in the vault thinks so. It is the true control room. If I wanted to, I could control every system from here. Even though Brandon can only give commands to the robots in person, I can give them commands remotely.

Loop 9 Year 5 Day 265

The last four and a half years have been nice. Chelsea and I only have to work short shifts a few times a week. Her job is to maintain the food farming area. Although it sounds hard, one of the first things Brandon ordered me to do was increase the abilities of the food harvesting robots. He thought that too much food went to waste. I told him I cannot reprogram any of the robots, so I had to build a few new ones. The improvements he told me to add where actually very sensible. I’ll be adding them in my next loop.

He still doesn’t understand that I made the food factory to support a hundred people for a thousand years. The sustainability is insane. Even if we had two-hundred people, we could still live easily for a couple of hundred years. On top of that the fecal matter keeps nutrients incoming. Though they don’t accept using the bodies of the dead to increase the amount of resources the farm can produce.

Chelsea’s job requires no effort at this point. She just goes there once or twice a week. The only real reason she goes is to placate the other vault-dwellers. If she didn’t go at all we would have a problem. They would start to resent her.

We try to have a baby at least once or twice a month. It seems I can’t have children… That’s very depressing. How do I know it’s not her? Well I talk about it to one of the girls that didn’t want to pair up with any of the guys. There are a few people that don’t want to have a relationship. Anyway, I talk to her and convince her to take a sperm sample from me. She takes the sample once a month. We continue to do this, with Chelsea’s permission, for about a year.

At this point I am practically sure I cannot have any children. It’s sad, but it’s not all bad. At least I have Chelsea.

Loop 9 Year 9 Day 1

Today is Election Day. This is the third Election Day we have had. Brandon is still the president. There is no term limit. He has started to go a bit crazy though. He obviously rigs the nightly votes for food. And has started controlling when and how people can spend their free time. I suspect that the vault will get rid of him this time.

Loop 9 Year 9 Day 2

I killed Brandon today. He lost the rigged Election yesterday. It was obvious that he had rigged it. There was enough votes for everyone to have voted twice. He won by a little over half. We took that as a sign that he needed to be changed out for a new president.

With his loss, he goes crazy. He grabs Chelsea and threatens to kill her if I don’t make it so he is the president again. Of course, I glare at the group, and pull out one of the guns from the munitions factory. Since only military are supposed to have them, the group must do what I say. The military are in training at this time.

As soon as he gets off the pedestal, he walks back to the president’s room. He throws Chelsea to the side, and goes to grab a gun on his table. I shoot him in the back of his head.

That night I cry myself to sleep. I had to do it, but I’ve never actually killed one of my own friends before. Even if two terms of absolute power has made him go crazy, I still wish I had another option.

That night Chelsea comforts me until the morning. I decide to put it behind me, and bury my guilty feelings.

Loop 9 Year 9 Day 15

I get arrested today. Having a gun outside of the military is a capital offense. At least it would have been if I made it so there was no capital offense punishment. Instead I am punished as all other mis-doers are. I am sent outside and must bring back a list of supplies that the vault needs. If I can’t find them all, I have to spend the next year in isolation doing manual labor that is harmful to the robot’s sensitive circuits.

Many of the people here are close friends of mine. They stick up for me telling the new president Taylor that it is unfair for me to be punished for something that saved many lives. He doesn’t listen.

The AI has been growing this entire time. It’s not true AI yet, but it is close. It can make basic decisions based on past instructions. That is a major step in the right direction. The AI will manipulate the videos that the president will see. It will look like I find these items in random abandoned areas.

In reality, I had the robots near me change their patrols and help me find them. It was very quick. It only took 12 hours. When I come back the people are pleasantly surprised. The president looks like he just realized someone put dog shit on his porch.

I hand the items to him. He accepts them, and takes them to the president’s room. I go to the ‘research lab’. I watch as he intentionally breaks one of the pieces. He smiles and brings the parts to the game room section. He announces that I brought a broken piece, and must therefore still receive the punishment.

I am already there obviously. I sigh and ask him if he has gone over all of the renovation details on his desk from a couple of weeks ago. Of course, after one week he had to swear he had read over everything and agreed.

The paper mentioned the ‘renovations’ I made to the president’s office. Including a camera that can be brought up by anyone by saying the words ‘Show me the Presidential Money!’.

He looks angrily at me.

“I didn’t read anything like that!” he yells. I watched him not read any of it though. So, I had a robot put that particular piece of paper in there.

When I say the words, it is too late though. His action of breaking the piece of hardware are being played on every television. I frown at him.

“It looks to me like you just tried to put the blame on me for something you did. Under article 4 section 3-a of our bylaws, as created by Brandon and the council, the president can’t lie. If the president tells any lie at all then the president shall face the highest level of punishment available.” The bylaws were created during the first year that Brandon was president.

He starts to stutter out a response, but I continue. “Furthermore, you are to be stripped of all of your power, and cannot be elected to any decision-making post for the remainder of your time here.”

Some of the people here are his relatives, and try to stick up for him, but I refuse to budge. Just as he forced me to leave the vault, I force him. The council has one of his family members in it, but the votes are five against one. If they bend the rules for Taylor, then they will have to bend the rules for everyone else.

Loop 9 Year 9 Day 20

The group watches as the ex-president gets killed by slavers. He finds the slavers by accident, and agrees to lead them here in exchange for his life. The videos don’t have audio, but it is obvious what he is doing. Especially since he uses a lot of hand gestures. As soon as they get here, to the radioactive front door, they kill him.

I say nothing, and go back to my research. As I head back the turrets kick in, and slaughter the entire group of slavers. They had no chance from the beginning. I decide to study every detail of atomic energy and atomic physics that the hacking computer has in storage.

Loop 9 Year 12 Day 15

I finally make a breakthrough in obtaining energy from the atom! During the past three years I invented a very powerful battery. The acid it uses is specially made by me. I don’t have enough material to make a lot of it, but the battery can produce as much charge as a typical nuclear reactor.

Using the super-heat-resistant liquid, I could actually pull a lot of electrical energy out of one charge of a battery. The chemical compounds are very complicated, but the chemicals are the same as a normal battery. The only difference is that the liquid added to the battery, in addition to an extremely small amount of uranium, cause a massive amount of electric discharge when used. The limiting factor is the uranium. Sadly, I couldn’t get very much uranium before the bombs fell. It’s a deadly substance after all. If I had a secret underground base with robots, and a lot of uranium, the government would think I’m building nukes!

I have the robots dismantle the nuclear reactor though. The uranium I bought from the black-market is enough to make a large amount of these batteries. The batteries are also easily rechargeable. All they need is a simple 1 volt reverse charge, and they began to rewind the chemical process completely. After 24 hours, they can be used again.

Only I knew about the reactor, so no one questioned it. The energy we get from these batteries vastly outstrips the molten salt core reactor. The parts are used to create another robot, a personal assistant for me. The rest is used in experiments on the effects of the uranium/HRL combination. HRL being my Heat Resistant Liquid.

I have the AI computer study the effect of uranium mixing with my HRL. This was all done about a year ago. Since then I’ve been trying my best to find a way to utilize this liquid with the electronic field generator.

Today was the day it finally happened! The past few days I’ve been getting a ton of information on the uranium/HRL combo. The last one threw me into a stupor.

I reconfigure my EFG, electronic field generator. Instead of using outside energy to pour the fields around the atom, I use batteries made from the HRL. Not only that, I have one experiment I do.

I add a single new apparatus to the machine. It pours just a bit of the uranium/HRL mix in. I have the machine split the atom, and instantly pour just a single drop of the liquid in. After a few minutes, I take the risk. Even if the machine blows up the liquid surrounding the entire machine will keep us safe.

I have the machine lower the electronic fields. Instead of the explosion I was afraid of, what I had hoped in fact happened!

The liquid inside the vacuum begins to glow purple, but otherwise is stable. I measure the total amount of electric energy in the liquid, 464.888 MWH! The smallest industrial nuclear reactor used to produce 504 MWH. Which is 504 Megawatts of electricity per hour. That is a lot of electricity. The electricity produced lasts for an entire week. That is just off one atom! For the number of atoms in the 12-foot-long cylinder that the nuclear reactors use, well that is in the trillions upon trillions.

I feel a glow come up to my cheeks. This research is the pinnacle of science! A single atom produces enough energy over the course of a week to last an average household for 4000 years! The greatest part of the experiment? The energy doesn’t discharge! It just stays right there in the liquid! I decide to rename the liquid.

From now on I will call it: Atomic Propulsion Gel. The APG will be used to power everything! The reason I put ‘propulsion’ in the name? I am planning on making all the robots use this as a power source. If that works I am going to build an electric car! APG will power everything!

Loop 9 Year 14 Day 1

It’s been exactly 13 years since I started this loop. It’s weird to think I know my exact age even though I haven’t been trying to keep track. If I just concentrate I can easily come up with the answers to just about any question I’ve heard about before. I don’t know if this is a blessing or a curse. There is very little that is hard for me anymore.

The only thing I really have left is my research. I do go on several dates a week with Chelsea though. Those are always nice. I still haven’t been able to produce a child. I decide to start to figure out why. Others have already reproduced several times. We even got Chelsea pregnant by using donated sperm.

Loop 9 Year 14 Day 65

Chelsea gave birth today. I don’t feel any real attachment to the child. Does that make me a bad person? Maybe it’s because I can only see it as the genetic material of someone else. I don’t know what to think at this point.

While Chelsea is giving birth, I’ve locked myself away in my lab. I am studying my sperm, as I have the past months. I have a high sperm count, since I haven’t had sex or self-pleasure for a while. They don’t seem to have any defects according to any of the material I’ve read on the computer. Maybe it is the combination of our genetics that just doesn’t work?

The APG was a huge hit. With the extra electricity, the rationing of electricity has been removed. The new president doesn’t bother me. Anytime I ask for something I generally tend to get it. Does she really think I’m going to kill her or something? Not my problem though.

The AI still isn’t completed. It’s technically been decades at this point. I put my work on figuring out why I can’t reproduce for another time. I put myself completely into finding out how to make the AI truly self-aware. After I memorize the current code of course.