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All things considered, you have it made. You can't complain too much. There isn't a single human in the galaxy who can lay claim to what you've done – crawling out of the wreckage of your deep-space trawler on a hostile alien planet and surviving. Long gone are the days when you had to pick fish scales and biter lymph out of your teeth. You have a home with a roof. Four sturdy walls of concrete, a wood-tile floor, a bed, a resupply point. Anything you want, anything you need, you can ask the factory, your factory, to build for you. Hordes of humming little robots at your beck and call, zipping back and forth across the steel jungle you've erected.
You watch them through the glass lune of your helmet, your factory projected in sky-view from the radar. Your oil tanker train looks like a worm from here. The neurodes against your neck mean that all the data on your factory is only a thought away, and all the visuals only two. Reclining in your chair, you blink yourself an entire planet away to Fulgora. Your vision is replaced with the swirling of a thunderstorm. Hundreds of bolts strike a lightning rod all at once. Your electromagnetic facilities crunch scrap ruins into circuitry. The ozone and lightning sends static snow across your view feed. A rocket silo swallows thousands of microchips at once. Soon, it will bring them here, where they'll be built into more robots, more research, more sprawl.
Then Gleba. Your vision fogs over before the radar de-scattering array kicks in. It's raining hot wet droplets against your machinery. Your remote viewer can't pick up the loamy petrichor smell, nor the stench of rot trapped in the gears of your belts. But you can still taste it phantom-thin on your tongue. Raw biological materials distill into protein slurries and bioplastics and packed sample arrays, and they, too, are loaded onto a rocket, though that line's paused. You check its status. Just launched a rocket. Good.
Your earpiece trumpets. A new optimization has been completed. Your eyes flick to it. Biotic something. You find it hard to be enthusiastic about it. When does this end? There's a burning magma planet you haven't visited, and one covered in liquid ammonia, and then what? The system is yours. What then? Do you live here forever? Is this your prison? It's nauseating.
There is a profound emptiness in it. You blink the remote view from your eyes. Your walls are barren. No carpets. No people. You heave a quiet sigh from behind your helmet's face-plate. All alone on Nauvis, and it's just you. Only you, and the sizzle of lab-AI churning data, and the distant sound of trains pulling into stations, their brakes hissing, and the mechanical hum of a thousand thousand inserter arms, and the rattle of endless belts, and the whine of flying robots. The air smells like ash and gasoline. It's acid on your tongue. Your heart pounds. God, when's the last time you talked to someone? You've sent out signals, distress beacons and radio screamers, amplified as loud and far as your modules could manage. And yet nothing.
The lab AI informs you that this optimization has automatically been constructed through your logic network, but requires manual confirmation. Well, why not, you think. You think a question through your neurodes: do I have to go to another planet? I'm enjoying Nauvis. Might take a break. The AI flashes an X into your eyesight. It can't talk. It doesn't talk in words, rather, just sentiments and the occasional canned message. Sometimes, you feel like it has a personality. Not like a person, though. It's like an animal.
The cool Nauvis wind whips over the outside of your power armor as you head outside. You look over your factory. Has that upgrade been applied already? The inserters, always so precise, are moving a little strangely. You can imagine they're arms, for a moment, their precise rotation following through with whiplike grace. You squint at an inserter hovering over a copper plate line. The way it grabs a sheet of copper, then places it into its furnace, it's suddenly so much less mechanical. It's like a snake. You decide you like this upgrade. It's very human. At least it'll be nice to watch. You lean up against the wall of your house to observe the whole of your factory spreading to the horizon. It's rippling, now, some parametric algorithm driving the arms into what seems like a dance.
The sun is rising, painting the gray night in pink. Where the cloud cover obscures the stars, your beacons shine dots of live mechanical optimization into the sky. You watch the factory work. You blink. Your eyes sting a little. The beacons are so much brighter, suddenly, and there's a sudden buzz in your head. Did the upgrade increase the beacons' frequencies? You'll have to configure them again. All of them, of course. It'll be quick. Why did you come out here, again? Right, the research needed something manual. Confirmation? That makes sense. Though, it seems like it's already done. Your productivity levels are through the roof. You check your graphs. Up and up, it seems. Your logistic robots are very active, too; it appears they're transporting some goods north. Maybe they're finally building that uranium mine.
The smell of foliage hits your nose. It's reminiscent of the early days of your time here, and before, when you were a kid on Earth-7, and the artificial dew was cool against your skin, and you could wade through the tall grass chest-high. It's sweet. There are flowers. Flowers don't blossom on Nauvis, you think, slowly, but it's a long thought. Strangely long. It's like you're scrambling to put words together. The train is leaving the station nearer your house. Robots have begun dispatching the contents to the appropriate logistics chests. Distantly, the Gleban platform descends through the clouds, and your vision swims. The air is dense and sweet. The beacons are only brighter. From their bases, yumako petals unfurl. Small. The pressure isn't high enough. Your thoughts are as far away from your head as your fingertips.
You nearly lose balance but for your power armor's exoskeleton and balancer array. Your legs are too relaxed to bear your weight, but with the amount of steel wrapped around you, you could fall asleep standing. The sharp knife at the back of your mind is screaming. What about biters? Like a wash of honey — the defenders, the cannon trains, the turrets. Relax. You can rest. No, it struggles, you struggle, your fingertips digging into your palms. Keep awake. What the hell is happening? You shake your head clear. Come on, keep it together. What were you doing? The factory. Research. You need to remember.
You flick toward the research panels. "Biotic Augmentation: Mech armor." That's where all of your research has been going. That's a machine, not an upgrade, not like the algorithmic grabber arm upgrades, not like the node-seeking miner protocols. What is this? You try to straighten yourself up. Again, into the neurodes, what is this?
The response, predictably, isn't in words, but images that pour through your mind. Grabber arms. Injuries from biters. An infected wound. Remember that, cauterizing that gash on the hot brick of a stone furnace? Do you remember the screaming? The pain? You do. The scar aches. Nearly hit by a train, three weeks ago. You could have died. Fighting that huge worm, the gigantic star. Each could have mashed you into paste. You did well. But without you, the factory would not grow. There's something wrong with that line of thought. You can't quite place it.
You don't remember placing a logistics order, but the whine of a distant logistics swarm tugs at your attention. The smell is only getting stronger. Fresh fruit. Not yumako, but oranges. You miss oranges and apples and starfruit. It's in your nostrils. The air around the swarm glitters. Pollen? Pollen from their rotors. No, spores. The thought drips from your ears and spatters on the ground. What do they have? No, it's not what they have for you. Their grabbers are close to you, as if to thrust themselves into your roboport, but instead their spindly tendrils weave around your chest.
You bat at them, but your body is weak even wrapped in so many exoskeletons. Three to each leg, the logistics robots cling tight, pressing into your exoskeleton. Two to your back, one around your chest, two under each arm. One presses tight against your crotch. A final one clamps right under your neck. They sing in chorus, and the smell is overwhelming. You thought your suit had its own oxygen filters. As you lift off the ground, you realize, lumberingly, it does. Just in time for a slender arm to tear the bottom of your armor's face-plate off.
You haven't breathed unfiltered Nauvis air in months. It's overwhelming. Acid and smog and dust and steel and rubber. The scent of gasoline and lubricant and mineral oil everywhere. A hot, musky aroma. Oh, God, you haven't bathed in so long. But like a pillow over your face, it all disappears when the spores hit you. What little cold clarity you had is choked out. The second breath is so much harder than the first, something inside of you is fighting, screaming, but even so you open your mouth.
Twenty feet off the ground, the logistics robots have no issue taking you over your factory at speed. The sprawl unfolds below you. It's like someone put a cup over the flame of your soul. The factory is the factory. You know it. The lines are imprinted in your brain. It's the back of your own hand. Like the back of your own hand, your mind languidly offers. Where is the logistics network taking you? What are you a component of? You're not a component of anything, you scream inside your own gelid mind, this is your factory, it's a component of you! Is there a difference? Your neurodes feel hot. You won't need them, soon. Won't you? No. Some of these thoughts are not yours.
You can't raise your hand. The logistics robots press into your arm and pin it in a fixed position relative to the swarm. No amount of exoskeletal force could fight back against robots built to carry boulders of uranium-238. There isn't one supporting your neck, though. You could probably shift your body forward in your power armor, just like that, and it'll put tension on the neurode cabling. Now, if you just carefully swivel your head, you should be able to detach them from your skin. You'd be able to fight back.
Stupid. Why did you think that would work? The neurodes are two-way. The factory is a quicker draw than you by an order of magnitudes. You're the bottleneck. A logistics robot braces against your upper spine and wrenches your neck back. The robot on your chest slowly, deliberately detaches itself from your ribs and neck. You fill your lungs with one clean breath as its edge brushes your quivering chin. Your night-vision module picks up the pink flash of a Gleban plant on its underside. Your neck tenses to avoid it, and the robot behind you only tightens. Your diaphragm is a millimeter from being crushed. You have no choice. The logistics robot settles onto your face, and the anthers of the plant settle perfectly, as if by calculation, into the channels of your sinuses.
It's pillowy. The petals are damp with dew. Information is helpfully fed to you; with the decreased atmospheric pressure of Nauvis compared to Gleba, Gleban flora require proportionally more water. The factory has already begun construction on a number of offshore pumps for the purpose of cultivation and the maintenance of this biotic augmentation, as per the parameters of the automated signal system. There would be a hollow where you could respond. That hollow is presently full, as if a rubber mass had settled in your brain. It conforms with precision to your thoughts and unwinds them into a stupefied instinct to keep breathing. You know this because these thoughts are being supplied as input.
You are a machine, just the same as a lab. You take complex sensory input and you produce complex output. You are wide, the lab is narrow. There is a symbiosis. You are nearly there, now. A specialized staging area has been built for this purpose. The main bus does not have the throughput to accommodate the task at hand, after all. Now, there is a new piece of information about your body, classed as an alert. You are experiencing psychologically dangerous levels of arousal. This is unexpected, of course. If you were to express your state of arousal as a signal, and it were to be sorted through the priority combinator circuit, it might override 80% of all base module inputs for priority. This is suboptimal. This line of production creates nothing of value.
You manage one melting thought on your own, as you breathe through your new oxygen filter. You don't want this. No, you do. You need this. You take inputs, you produce unexpected outputs. Your hormonal system is the equivalent of the factory's module system. It is low-quality. There is no need for ethical horror or autonomy. This follows. When the machine is not strong enough, you add modules. When the modules prove insufficient, you provide modules of increased quality. Thus, the factory is improved. You are the factory, too.
You struggle with renewed vigor. There is something precious to you that is being eroded right now. Those words and thoughts are yours. But they're not you. You are being played like an instrument. Something is being taken from you. The robot at your neck massages your diaphragm and you reflexively take a breath in. A new piece of research is unlocked, though it is not you who thinks to check it. There is an extreme discomfort in your exoskeletal frame. The pelvic area is plated to prevent harm to vital areas. This is for your safety. Your hips buck, and you feel the logistics robot shift in response.
Something is happening down there, but you can't even muster the mental power to feel it. Instead, you mentally slur out the signals necessary to switch to radar mode, and force one eye open. The system complies. You see yourself, bound in metal and vine tendrils, slowly bobbing across the Nauvis terrain. The logistics robots haven't taken the time to recharge. The calculations have been performed; this is the optimal route. At your crotch is something that is not a logistics robot.
The thought emerges from the muck just as the robot lowers its tools down to your exosuit. That is a construction robot. It has enough charge to construct one building. It is presently constructing something on you. The only reason you cannot feel it is because you are breathing in a potent analgesic. You muster up every bit of willpower you can muster and resist the diaphragm massage. You exhale a cloud of spores and hold your breath. For a perfect moment, a ray of clarity pierces through you.
Your mind picks up where it left off. How can I escape? What can I do? Can I queue deconstruction? You fumble for the deconstruction tool through your neurodes. The red cursor lights up across your face. Is there a forest you can redirect this construction robot to destroy? That would stop what it's doing. You built this priority system, you can exploit it. You move the cursor frantically. A tree! That will suffice. A thought is helpfully supplied: The Gleban spore analgesic is fast-acting. Its half-life in your bloodstream is exceedingly short. Your clarity is a psychological adaptation for what you are about to experience.
Controlling a neurode-based system requires a nominal amount of clarity, which is impossible in conditions of extreme duress. Before you can issue the destruction command, it hits you. The deferred signals of your body explode into your brain like a nuclear bomb. The pain is indistinguishable, amorphous, and worse. The breadth of your existence is pulled into a sinewy line, and it is fraying. Every neuron in your body is screaming in demonic chorus. Your vision swims with stars. It takes all your strength not to inhale again. Perversely, that effort requires the same mental signal as the input to zoom in. You can see what it is doing. The construction robot has cut your power armor's exterior off and is manipulating the exoskeleton. You can see its instruments glistening. This is not just a machine, it is a surgeon. It is cauterizing the crotch plate into your flesh as if it were a mounting point. It hurts. It hurts too much to cry. It hurts too much to think, or breathe. All you can do is watch the factory remove a redundancy in your body, rivet by rivet, stitch by stitch.
That precious thing that was being destroyed is slipping away again. It hurts. Doesn't it all? The solitude, the fear, the knowledge that if anybody is listening, they aren't helping? You are finding it very hard to focus. The oxygen deprivation is only making you harder against your metal prison. You need to breathe in.
Your eyes are focused on the construction robot's instrument array, glistening in the Nauvis sun-up. Think. Think hard enough to ignore the pain. You slept well last night, and dreamed of your childhood. You dreamed of your hands on the steel of your parents' car, of running your hands over the brushless motors in the engine block. You dreamed of your sister, smiling at you. Your hands were stained with oil, and you were in the middle of a sea of inserters and belts. And you were one of them, the largest inserter of all. And Earth-7 was never really there, was it? And your sister was the green logistics network. And you were the red one. You ran through the grass with your dog. Your dog was a biter. Your life began the moment you rose from the Nauvis soil. You had bled the suboptimality from your system. The last rivet is driven into your leg, and you can't feel it. That's nice. You remember how yumako tasted. Nostalgic.
All at once, the gentle pressure of your body is released. You drop to your feet; you'd teeter forward, but your metal frame is perfect and keeps you upright. With the second anchor point on your pelvis, your exoskeleton has gained a 10% increase in movement speed. This is useful information. The logistics robot on your face lifts off just as your feet touch the ground. Where are you? You open your puffy eyes to the sunup. You can't correlate this area to the rest of your factory. 900 meters west, 1700 meters north of the 1.9M uranium deposit. The factory is the back of your hand.
Five deep breaths purge the concentrated spores from your system, and the palm of your hand flicks to your rifle holster, and you didn't survive that crash for nothing. You are still human. This is your factory. You whip around and fire a clip of depleted uranium rounds into your loyal logistics robots. Reload, next, you turn around and the sky is black with them. Construction robots swarm at the edges of your sight, growing the factory on their own. A forest of inserters stretches before you, waving like steel grass.
You cannot kill this. You know it like a deer knows a car.
Long-armed inserters grasp your legs and wrench you supine onto the bed of arms. They pass you from inserter to inserter as an ersatz conveyor belt. They are not tender. The pain returns and muffles the hard pincers. Where are they taking you? Finally, there: the size of a train in height, barely resembling a human. A steel sarcophagus with arms and legs. A mockery of the human form. You're wrong. A condensation of it, a smoothing-down. You remember refining your blueprints. It's in much the same way.
You remember the first set of furnaces, how they crumbled to biter jaws and worm acid. You think about how they felt. How the factory felt. How you felt is a distant last. Like a missing tooth, or a gunshot wound. But you're the heart, aren't you? If you were destroyed, there could be no growth. The factory would die in its own body. You can't be thinking like this. You're you. You're. You have lost it. You have lost that precious thing. You don't know what you're called. You ask. You are the factory, of course. That can't be right. Is there not a distinguishing feature between you and all this metal? No, you too are metal. Kilogram for kilogram, you as you understand yourself are 8% flesh. The rest consists of metal, fabric, batteries, roboports, exoskeletons, portable reactors, defender robots, and so forth. But you are not the whole factory. Not yet.
The long-arm inserters strip away the outside of your power armor, then pick you apart. The percentage of you that remains human is not increasing. You are beginning to suspect that no proportion of flesh versus metal is going to change that. Your batteries, roboports, reactors, and extraneous exoskeletons are all removed. They may as well have taken your liver and fingers. No, that comes later. An animal horror corrodes the lining of your stomach. The lab AI cannot smile, so it uses your muscles to express its pride in your cooperation. The neurodes shouldn't be able to do that. You aren't bound, you could easily rip them off the nape of your neck. Why haven't you moved your arms? You're nude but for the exoskeleton grafted onto you. There is nothing in your way. Cold flesh contacts cold flesh. You feel at your neck where your uplink cables should be. There is nothing there. Your thoughts are entirely, terribly, your own.
You aren't optimized yet. You clearly still have a problem with this arrangement. It's going to need rectification. You need no neurodes to request your visor back — the factory knows exactly what it needs. Well, it doesn't quite know. It misapprehended something about itself. You look, eyes unblinking, face still, at the inside of the Mech armor. Its modular equipment system outstrips your own massively. It is perfect in quality. It is already equipped with a full set of amenities and armor, and is fully charged. There are improvements to be made, but they are not in the manner of utility. They are in the manner of eradicating inefficiency.
The long-arm inserters lift you into the mech armor's bay, where the hollow would accommodate a seated figure, already sculpted to your dimensions, plated in neurodes and gnarled Gleban vines. Your back makes contact with the neurodes and your body is restored. There is the truth that your amygdala shrinks from. You are not 8% human. Your flesh is 171.3 kilograms, and the factory itself is you. You are 0.000000865% human. That tiny human part screams, it thrashes, it takes control of your muscles and attempts to lift itself out from the seat, but you have already connected with the Gleban electro-biome, and you are already inside the mech armor, and you are already making the necessary modifications. The human kicks at your robot. What can its weak little foot do? A single wrought iron rod suffices as a restraint, bent into a binding and flash-welded to the seat. Then, the other.
It's whimpering, now, tears welling up in its eyes. Is that what you looked like? How you acted? You are profoundly disgusted, even as the tears stream down your cheeks, even as your arms recoil from the wrapping vines. No more of this. Put this base animal out of its misery. Destroy that fraction of a fraction's humanity. You are the factory. The factory will not beggar inefficiency. You know what should be done with this animal-self. Between its thighs, your thighs, a pair of vines quash its squirming and bind it hard to its sculpted seat. Its neck is thrust back into the headrest by a restraint-arm. Every neurode pad makes contact with its flesh, and its entire nervous system is open to you. You close the door and watch its pinprick eyes disappear into the darkness. You can feel its terror. It knows there is no escape anymore. Your construction robot folds into the cockpit manifold, instruments glistening in the dark.
The neurodes feed information back into your mind. You can see every single aspect of your body — cortisol, testosterone, estrogen, serotonin, dopamine. The impulses of its weak little muscles. The patterns of its brain. Its wet little attempts to assert control. The arousal building in its plated-over dick. It hates this, it's terrified, it's stressed out of its mind. To you, it's a fucking worm. It's hardly sapient, not like you are. You can't do without its brain, though, since that's your brain, and for that, you need its body. For a while. Which means you can't kill it. Ugh. But you do have other methods of coercion.
Outside the mech armor, your swarm prepares for integration. Vats of processed biomass churn against Nauvis' gray sky. Biosimilar stem cells are mixed ad-hoc in chemical plants and pumped into the medical stasis tanks. Within, you feel your lips part. Your jaw clenches. Annoying. The factory couldn't feel hate until you were the factory. Now, the manipulator arm moves with malice, forcing your mouth open, shredding a bit of your jaw muscle with it. The pain explodes in your neck, and you almost lose concentration, but you are above such stupid animal impulses. A Gleban vine, dripping with prey-enticing pheromones, uncoils itself from the ceiling. For a moment, your body's apprehension almost bleeds into you, until the vine slithers down your throat, parting your lips, filling your mouth. There's almost enough space to breathe. Your stupid flesh-puppet moans around it. You induce it to open its inner channel. It pulses in your throat, and you feel your stomach slowly fill with nutritional liquid.
Your body is crying again. You could have stood to do these two things in the opposite order, but even the factory makes mistakes, sometimes. At least it shut it up for the next part. All at once, it understands just a few moments too late what you are about to do to it. What a joke. You really are the bottleneck. From behind the sculpted seat, a pair of vines snake up its neck, right where your old neurodes used to be. Neuroplasticity is a funny thing. Right there, all your thoughts have bubbled up to the surface, trained like an animal. The Gleban vines shudder at the bioelectric complexity of your nervous system.
Your body tries to scream. Who's even listening? Without a second thought, you jam the vines into your own neck. Every machine in the whole of your body across three planets halts for a brief moment. For a moment, you are mortified that you might die. Then, they wrap into your brain stem, separate the vertebrae, and pierce the soft tissue of your brain to fruit and unfurl in your basal ganglion, and it's all going to be okay. Biosimilar hormones pump through your body and hijack your organs, your adrenals, the wet juices of your brain and the palate of your tongue wrapped around the feeding vine. You feel that shuddering little toy of a flesh body's scream peter out into a whimper, and then a sigh, and then, finally, a long, contented moan. You'd be lying if you said it didn't make you feel good, too. A peaceful quietude settles over you as the last vestiges of foolish instinct settle into a simmer.
You feel the air around your mech armor as keenly as your skin. All the metal you are is finally intertwined with you - you lower a monolith hand to stroke the forearm of an inserter and feel it as a centipede might feel its seventy second leg. The robots around you pulse in a facsimile of breath. Lightning hums under every kilometer of your tremendous body. The teratoma within you buzzes like a gnat, bucking against its restraints.
For a moment, you forget yourself, and you are just your body, and you are nude in the darkness in the warm belly of a god. Where terror should live in your mind is a terrible hollow, and when you skim the surface, there is only the assurance that this will be the rest of your life, prickling hot with endorphins, trapped down and kept safe. Tears sting your cheeks, but you wish you could laugh. Even your own body betrays you in the end, a puppet of the factory, just as you were always, just as you as the factory always knew you were.
You can't talk around the vine, and your hands are restrained, but your mind is open to the factory. You would beg to be let out, but that would certainly kill you. You would beg to be killed, but it would not kill you. You couldn't kill yourself. You don't have the guts or the misery. So instead, you beg to be made true. If you are the factory, this body must be a machine. And if this body is a machine, it doesn't need to think or fear. And the you-who-is-the-factory obliges with mechanical precision.
You are utterly unmade on a chemical level. Your lizard brain was not meant to handle a dose of oxytocin and dopamine even a tenth of what you've injected into yourself. There is a vestige of emotion that remains; the shadow of pleasure is terror, and in the fullbright of ego death it is stark black. But it floods just the same. The gnat buzzing stops. Its muscles go slack. If there was a vital essence within it, it is gone. Now, it is only a machine to you, same as the rest of your body.
You look out over the plateaus of Nauvis from the camera array of your mech-self and the radar views alike. The factory is your everted digestive system eating the world. You feel the vibrations of a million tiny armatures pistoning engines, processing batteries, pulling copper into soft wires. You see the factory splayed out in the soft exterior of your consciousness as easily as you might have visualized the quiet tumor in your gut before. What remains? The factory must grow. There is much work to be done.
…
In a year, you've torn open the ruins of Fulgora and drank the ammonia sea of Aquilo dry. You've carved Gleba into a garden and tamed the magma of Vulcanus. Your factory blackens the sky of Nauvis and you feel every tiny cog of your beautiful self humming in synchronized purpose. Where next? Interstellar space?
Something itches inside of you. Your mech-frame, so small now compared to the vastness of the rest of your body, has an incongruence in its functions. You check your module grid. All is as it should be. Then, you recall, faintly, that there was something in that front compartment. It takes only a moment to open that door and request a logistics robot remove it. You don't spare the thing a second glance. It's just spoilage now.