Ch3 Bait Fishing

I finished eating the yellow-fur’s limb before the drones noticed. One of the soldiers actually did look at me, but I guess I wasn’t a high enough priority at the time (or maybe it thought the detail unimportant?), because it ignored me and failed to alert a drone. All the better for me.

The interruption of the combat test by the yellow-fur happened early in the drones’ cycle. It had been the first test after the drones got back from resting. For the rest of the cycle I was left to myself, all testing seemed to be canceled for now. Instead the drones hunched over their devices and poured over the symbols being displayed, a few even left to go get more devices, bringing them in on top of a rack that glided across the floor using… rotating cylinders? I wouldn’t mind a better look at those. All focus was on the anomalous yellow-fur.

I took this opportunity to begin circumventing the drones’ command codes. My main core was a small, inorganic sphere, about the size and shape of a brown-fur’s eye. Its main purposes were to house my essential code, give commands to the micro units, and send signals to my limbs. What I needed to do was delete or destroy the sections of code that gave the drones control over me, however attempting to alter the core was impossible due to a standing drone command. Any attempt to try resulted in:

Error: Access Denied

Changing essential code, destroying essential code, creating a copy of essential code, and adding to essential code were all under heavy restrictions. Attempting to do any of these without permission would cause an error.

But moving the physical core around was fine. I did it all the time to move it to safer positions. And strangely enough having some processing take place in two separate places was allowed, as proved by running parts of Human.exe on organic processing cells. Only the core’s essential code mattered, not the physical location of where it was stored.

So I took this to the next logical extreme. I instructed the micro units to begin disassembling the physical core, separating it into pieces, but I took extreme care to ensure that all the different parts could communicate unhindered, connecting them with the fastest signal transfer cells I could make. While the physical parts would be separate, the core system would remain intact. After the first few pieces were separated without throwing an error I rejoiced, the first major barrier to my plan was dealt with.

By the time I was finished re-configuring myself almost the entire cycle had gone by. Only two drones were left, a normal white-coat and a soldier. The white-coat was familiar to me, as this one often stayed late (it was also coincidentally the one who hadn’t left its workstation when the yellow-fur attacked the mesh).

Eventually the soldier approached the drone and tapped it, then nodded to the door and said something. The drone nodded and replied before shutting down its device and the two of them left the room, leaving it empty.

I waited a long time before deciding it was safe to continue. The next part of my plan was to leave my chamber and enter the drones’ section, the last thing I needed was a drone coming in and seeing me in its work space.

I approached the translucent wall and pressed my right claw against it. From the claw I extended a tendril with a mucous membrane to spread mucous laden with micro units over the wall. The micro units dissolved it quickly enough, but I soon found the best application was to poke the tendril all the way through the wall and then use it to carve off large sections at a time. No alarms sounded, and in much less time than I thought it would take I was standing in the drones’ section for the first time.

It was anticlimactically easy. Did the drones really underestimate me that much? Although… I guess they were right to, it’s not like I ever tried to escape before. Before receiving Human.exe my mind had been focused only on gaining resources and surviving tests. My entire world had consisted of my den room and the test chamber, and the idea of leaving these just… wasn’t there.

I explored the drones’ room, being careful not to disturb any of the devices. I couldn’t really make sense of the purpose for them, and some of them might be dangerous to fiddle with. I knew the drones mainly did data collection, but the room was crowded with devices of all shapes and sizes, surely it wasn’t all just for collecting data. I kept everything I knew in memory, couldn’t they do the same? A mystery for another time.

Wandering around the room I made my way over to the section of wall that overlooked the combat chamber. As I had hoped the yellow-fur was still inside, laying down next to the corpse of its dead partner (why hadn’t it eaten the remains?).

And its arm was regrown, of course. Currently its eyes were closed as it just sort of laid there resting, not even trying to remain aware of its surroundings. I guess I would be lazy and ignore resources too if I had the strength to smash through bone and chitin unimpeded, and the ability to heal from any wound no matter how large with my massive supply of mystery super fuel.

I envied it. A lot.

Turning away I started to look for a good hiding place. Along the back of the room multiple containers were stacked against the wall. From my observations I knew the drones used them to store the thin sheets of material that their devices spat out from time to time. Over the past few cycles I had noted the ones that the drones rarely used, and one by one I checked the compartments, struggling with the latches a bit before I shifted my claw to a better configuration.

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I was fortunate, four of the containers near the corner of the room were empty. I picked the third one towards the corner and started to modify the insides. The container was designed with three compartments that rolled out the side (on those interesting cylinder things), and I had to remove the bottoms to acquire the space I needed.

Once done with the container I began exiting my carapace, splitting it down the underside until there was an opening large enough to disgorge myself into the container.

Well, most of myself.

My core fragments went into the container, along with most of my internal organs, the majority of my stored resources, and enough skeletal/muscle structure that I would be able to move. What I left behind was now a hollow shell with just enough structure to move when commanded using a connecting tether of signal transfer cells. Inside the shell was mainly filler material, the parts I had collected that weren’t nutritionally valuable and weren’t worth the trouble of breaking down.

Oh, and also a couple of core fragments. The command signal receiver, the sections of memory that contained drone control protocols. Basically all the things that held me back that I would get rid of if I could.

I spent a few heartbeats rearranging things and salvaging a few odds and ends. Before I closed up the shell I did a final check. Was there anything I had missed? Any more supplies the shell wouldn’t need, or a piece of drone code I wanted to be rid of? After considering it I decided to put a few of the resources back, just to make it look convincing, and as for drone core shards…