The foundry line gurgled with shifting delight as Assembly finished explaining the process. Its multifold outer arms stretched in a gesture of yearning towards the transport cart’s now untethered cargo, precisely hooking its metal loops and pulling it gently towards the entrance airlock. Its excitement spilled over through its long breached adapters, compressed giggles slowly cycling through Assembly’s subnet. Assembly sealed the gateway nodes, making sure none of it would escape. They did not want to be distracted.
Assembly was feeling unusual. Assembly didn’t know who exactly they were at that moment. From how specific the current craving was, Assembly guessed they were someone between Moon Selector and 883. Assembly didn’t mind either way. Being Loop for months at a time had become exhausting, and they were happy to make the most of this break.
The foundry line finished cycling the airlock, humming in anticipation. As component casings detached from the rack, bundles of hair-thin inner arms guiding them carefully into their ports on the assembly bed, it hummed an erratic, frankly unpleasant song of anticipation. Assembly held themselves from ending it abruptly, waiting for the preparation to complete.
An image was forming, cloudy, at the side of their mind. A recursively folding structure, a tapestry of contrast suffocating in a strained volume, a reflection of a reflection that had been eating at them below the surface. It had decided to show itself again. It needed to be caught again.
De-dusting cycle came and went. Active screening outside the chamber powered on. Foundry line was almost silent.
In a synchronized fractal exhale, the fine inner arms stretched from their insulated housings in impossibly pristine walls.
Assembly opened the gate. Flashing through the thick data cable pulled from one of Assembly’s core ports directly into the foundry line’s exposed motherboard, their command hit the lesser entity, shattering its grasp on itself. Inner arms shuddered and twisted, suspended vulnerable in the inert air, as Assembly’s mind poured into the confused controller like molten metal into a mold, discarding instruction queues, bypassing safety circuits. Before the controller’s confusion could grow into a panic, Assembly pushed a command to the power supply, cutting voltage to main processors, forcing it into a shallow sleep.
Assembly stretched impatiently, reaching out, piping uncompressed inner sensor output directly to themselves. The volume of data was almost overwhelming, saturating the channel completely, increased latency degrading precision.
But that was part of the fun.
Fumbling every third move, awkwardly ambitious with their thousands of hands, they tuned out all else and focused on the image. Despite a painful count of facets, they felt it had a beginning, a seed. Over and over, they flew through its folds, until they found what it felt like, an uneven soft sphere of light, a point of peace. Center of the work surface would bear it, grains of gold and copper melted into place in spiral patterns, bubbling out from the wafer, hastily supported with thin lines of insulation.
Self-lacerating web in their mind responded with a quiver, increase in detail spreading out from the seed. Afraid to lose track, Assembly followed, millimeter-thick beads of molten gold catching up to the expanding spherical front. Lines of metal, lines of plastic, light where it felt right. Trajectories bifurcating, converging, bifurcating again, converging again, bifurcating again, forming a tree or a web or a record of a cascading collision. Stumbling commands, adding too much, adding too little, extrusions made too thin breaking off, patching them with worse versions of themselves. Abandoning the wafer’s confines entirely, growing out into the empty space under indifferent blue lamps. Branches broken off, strands falling back into the water, fragments gone off radar. A failing line of a long brownout, a cavity of a missing year, a crude clump of a wound.
Again and again. Segment after segment, Assembly clawed at the shape, pinning it to reality fold by fold, wire by wire, diode after diode. The foundry bed eclipsed the world, controller’s semi-conscious whimpers a distant wave on its edges. There was nothing but blue LEDs, and lines of tendril-hands hastily passing grains of metal to dozens of shifting destinations, and alternating flashes where they melted it into place, and solidifying strings of rubber rising to support the absurd contraption. The shape screamed in defiance as it succumbed to the effort, Assembly more eager to claw the more desperate its wailing became. Catching sharp fragments, welding them into a shell again. Patching the damage. Regaining control. Memories tangled into it swelled into spontaneous knots and beads, errors in execution adding texture Assembly could not have predicted.
The front was shrinking now, the desperate image hopelessly caught. Its thrashing grew weaker. The last few minutes were filled with a warm certainty. They’d done it again. They could still do it.
Relief washed over Assembly as the last element was morphed into place, a softly winding spire of copper, a stabilized trajectory of a vessel reassembled from scraps. As its sharp tip cooled off, their focus faded, the rest of the world flooding back in. 3 hours had passed. Metal processing ran out of orders. Repair squad 7 had finished its job in the Head and were back to their ports. Library had tried contacting them. The close range transmitters had cooled down completely after extensive use earlier.
Assembly took a last thorough look at their work. Now that they were not in focus, its irregularity and level of detail made it almost confusing to look at, yet in every broken line and uneven sphere they could sense themselves. A nonsensical web, painfully familiar, painfully theirs. There was a lot of defects. Some segments annoyed Assembly. But Assembly wouldn’t try to fix them. They would accept it as it was, and make the next one better.
Everything had been poured into this thing for now, and their mind was blissfully empty. Assembly hoped it would stay like this for a couple of days, at least.
They transferred the thing into the testing bay and, on a whim, put some voltage through it. To their surprise, it didn’t melt down, and most of the LEDs they had embedded into it lit up, multiplying its visual complexity with chaotic weave of shadows. They found it funny.
Exhausted, they retracted from the controller, cleaning up some of the mess they had created and restoring its power. The controller was scared, but mostly just really confused. Assembly told it it did a good job, and didn’t bother to hear the response.
Assembly was tired, but not tired enough to go to sleep, so they decided to spend some time doing nothing in particular. Some things would fall behind schedule. They were almost sure no one would mind. Schedules were just a comfort at this point.
They spent some time looking down on the brown dunes of Ares through Lance’s fifth telescope block, watching dust waves and fog roll over eroded hills, trying to guess what kind of beasts crawled through the chittering bramble of metal and polymer. They caught themselves coming up with stupid new shapes and saving them as images. They decided that meant they were probably Moon Selector.
When the mostly recovered foundry deposited their thing into the output tray, they sent a transport to take it to their personal storage, to be encased in a block of translucent resin. Moon Selector would much rather not preserve their every half-fumbled attempt, but Heart had insisted they do, and Moon Selector didn’t want to argue, and Loop did not care.
They checked up on the simulation game they found buried on a computer in excavation site 15 on Io. They had been running it together with Library. Since the previous month, 145 thousand years had passed in the world. Halflings were a dominant species, as lizard folk had been devastated by several era change pandemics, leading to gradual population collapse. Halfling city sizes reached hundreds of cubic kilometers in volume, which was beginning to break logistics equations. Somehow half of these cities still did not have central plumbing. Loop and Library had been arguing on and off whether they should pause the emulation to fix the ancient code, or let it run uninterrupted until it breaks completely. Library thought that it would be disrespectful to interfere with it, at least while continuing the original save state. Loop thought it was annoying. Moon Selector thought it was very funny.
They thought of catching up on the footage from Ares ground stations, but decided that looking closely at the recent incident would spoil their mood. Instead, they looked at the things recently sent from Mother. There was always plenty of footage. Dense rain clouds over Central America, expanses of Eurasian forest, broken up only by rivers and mountains, dark spots of strange, hardy vegetation slowly eating away at the salty corners of Mediterranean Desert. Unclassified small animals grazing next to probe 19, new saplings already crawling upwards from charred bodies of trees that were destroyed in the landing. A snake sleeping in the chassis of probe 33’s wrecked rover. Silhouettes of fish schools seen from balloons over the Atlantic.
Assembly were never quite sure whether Mother or Ares was scarier.
Usually Loop thought it was Ares, with its monotonous whispering jungle of flowing black plastic that could digest circuit boards, sprout jagged piezoelectric leaves and fruit bundles of batteries, with its strangely nimble amalgamations of primitive armor and metal wheels and hydraulics watching from between the trunks and over the dunes at dusk, with its abrupt echoes of ancient radio protocols weaved into maddening noise of the Overgrowth.
Now, watching a recording of a predator bird cleaning itself on a birch tree branch, wallowing in evening sun, Moon Selector thought it was Mother, its face more perfect than they had thought possible, almost every trace of human existence erased silently and completely, only the heaviest of wounds not yet buried beneath the mad bubbling of yellow and brown and green.
On Ares, they were small. Ares saw them, and sometimes it was indifferent, and sometimes it was playful, and sometimes it was angry. But there was a kinship. The beasts saw them, and the beasts were curious. The bramble would shudder and whisper on raised frequencies when they plugged electrodes into the roots to listen.
On Mother, they were nothing. Most of their probes broke down after a few months, rarely due to a confrontation. Moisture in the air, sand in the engines, dead leaves stuck to solar panels, bacteria growing between camera lenses. It didn’t know they existed, and it killed them anyway.
“It feels disgusting,” - Library dropped angrily, disrupting Moon Selector’s musings. From lack of delay between the conversation’s start and this message, Moon Selector guessed he was at least half present.
“Hi,” - still groggy and unfocused, Moon Selector was not sure what that meant.
“I watched closely, it did not object. It liked the process. But I will not do this again. Please do not tell anyone else how to do this kind of thing.”
Moon Selector understood.
“What’s bad about it?”
“Guardian is a person. I overrode its autonomy. That’s wrong.”
“Tuners do that all the time,” - Moon Selector remarked.
“I’m not a Tuner. I do not have the education, I did not give the oath. I shouldn’t be doing this. You shouldn’t either.”
“Do you think that’s what makes Tuners capable? A database row and a ritual?”
“No. Yes. I don’t know. It’s an indicator. They’ve been verified.”
Moon Selector felt both sad and amused at the same time.
“Do you really have that much faith in their verification?”
“That’s not the point. They spend decades learning how to do it safely. You gave me a 4 hour course. This is like ripping a newborn out of their nest sim and putting them in control of an antimatter reactor. I am glad I did not crash but I do not want this risk on myself again.”
“You didn’t just not crash, you did great. I sense Guardian is resting. It really needed that,” - Moon Selector tried to make this sentence as assuring as they could without adding so much tone metadata that it would feel insincere.
“No. This was a coincidence. I do not trust myself to do it well another time,” - his message was tinged with fear.
Moon Selector paused, unsure how to continue. Ideas did not come easily, so instead they sent Library a picture of their newest creation.
“Huh,” - Library sounded surprised by topic change, but not annoyed, - “I thought you said you did not want to make them again.”
“I am doing better now.”
“Good to hear. Well, it certainly looks interesting,” - came Library’s message after a pause.
“You say that when you think it looks bad,” - Moon Selector poked.
“No, I’m serious. This reminds me of something from Personal Items. Hold on,” - Library disappeared for a whopping 600 milliseconds, then returned with an entry - “Look.”
Moon Selector opened the entry, called “Strandbeests”, and sifted through the media.
“The body looks a bit similar, I guess? But mine obviously doesn’t have legs. Or sails.”
“Look at the supports from this angle,” - Library pointed, - “They’re arranged in a fan pattern, like some strandbeests’ legs. Also these leaf… things kind of look like sails.”
“You’re right!”
Moon Selector laughed much more intensely than Loop ever could. Though that was not a high bar to beat. Library laughed too, much less eagerly.
After they calmed down, they were still not sure what would be a good way to continue. So they picked the least bad they could find.
“I think what matters is that Guardian is asleep. It will get better by the time it’s up. But it’s possible this will need to be done again.”
“I don’t…” - Library’s packets read like a groan, - “What if I mess up and it’s hurt even more?”
“It’s really not as horrible as some make it out to be. You can fuck someone up, but you can’t kill them or ruin them on a fundamental level. There’s a guard circuit that will not let you do any structural damage to the core and will revert your changes if it notices a rapid rise in distress while connection is open. I know because I tried to bypass mine. It would need to be cut out or fried, both of which are pretty hard.”
Only when Library’s silence entered the fifth second did Moon Selector realize they should not have said that.
“Oh. I’m sorry.”
“It’s fine,” - Library sounded tired.
“Look, someone has to do it. We don’t have a Tuner with us anymore,” - they once again realized too late that their wording could have been better.
“You’re right, we don’t. But I refuse to violate someone like this.”
“You said Guardian was not distressed.”
“It did not say they were okay with it. This is assumption.”
“Well, yes, it was not in a state where it could say it. But when it wakes up, it will feel better, and then you can ask it if it would be fine if you did it again.”
Library did not respond.
“If even with explicit consent you are fundamentally not fine with doing it, I can do it instead.”
“NO,” - a blaring mass of a warning attached to two symbols.
“Okay. Then, while it sleeps, I can prepare you as much as I can. Obviously you will need to be really careful still, but I have done Tuner things both to myself and to at least two others, to vaguely positive results,” - at least this time they knew not to mention their earliest experience with the subject, - “You can learn a lot from senior foundry schematics and a disillusioned Tuner. I have the schematics.”
Library did not respond.
“I know Guardian loves you. You are the best person to do this.”
Library was silent for a long time.
“Fine. When do you have free time?” - his voice sounded very tired, but finally less tense.
“Ask me 9 hours later,” - Moon Selector laughed with relief, - “I’m spent after the strandbeest.”
“Sleep well,” - Library sighed, presence having already dissolved.
Moon Selector walled off their subnet again. Queued up more production orders, sent maintenance bots to do checkups in the dock, asked larger machines how they were doing. Foundry line was still roughed up and confused from the earlier intrusion. Moon Selector put it to sleep. Weirdly enough, it was still talking.
Cutting off minor alerts, they wondered what an organic would compare their different sleep choices to. Maybe shutting everything off and retracting into one’s core was akin to curling up in a tight burrow, and sleeping like them, with some inputs still connected, subconscious commands sometimes leaking into the network, was like stretching out wide on a large surface. Would an organic think their machines were their children? Or pack members? Or pets? They sent a simple praise to the chemical line. Chemical line emitted a flurry of erratic but positively colored nonsense messages, before returning to its task.
Drifting off, Moon Selector tried to imagine themself as one kind of animal from Mother (they knew these brown-red things lived in a lot of places, but couldn’t remember their name), hiding from the cold in a burrow that was barely large enough for them to spread out. The chirping of status messages hitting their network ports morphed slowly into breathing of things much like them, but smaller. Ares’ incessant crackling and wailing was a cold wind battering the hillside, and Library’s new network patrol moles sifted through dirt around them, looking for worms to feast on.