The House of the Reaper has opened its arms to welcome:
Novices RavenSystem, call_me_b4rti, James, and CROW.
Operatives Petre daniel, Gnomon, ZJAY1, and Blank602.
Their contributions and dedication to our cause will be honored through the Net and through the Stars.
---
Octavia put her fist through the wall of the mech bay's office, and the printed drywall gave way, sending a line of dust from the ceiling.
Mark, who had been leaning against the doorframe with his arms crossed, didn't flinch. He'd seen her frustration building for weeks, and this was, by his count, the third time something in the office had absorbed the impact of a problem that the simulation terminal couldn't solve.
"I take it the test didn't go very well," Mark said.
"The test went exactly the way the last fourteen tests went," Octavia said, pulling her fist out of the wall and shaking the dust off her knuckles. "The attenuation layer works. The damn software filter works. Hell, the bandwidth throttle is holding just fine. But the moment we push past forty-two percent throughput, the feedback loop destabilizes and the entire lattice rejects the input signal the same way a body rejects a transplant."
She turned to him, and though her face was composed, her jaw was set in a way that was now familiar to Mark. It was the way it got when she was trying not to say something she'd regret. "The resonance lattice wasn't designed to run at partial capacity. It's all or nothing. If we break it down, then we see that the Strathari built the system to operate at full integration, and every time we try to feed it a reduced signal, it interprets the attenuation as a malfunction and shuts the handshake down."
"And how long does it take for rejection to set in?" Mark asked.
"Eleven seconds," Octavia said. "It's up from four seconds six weeks ago, so we're definitely making progress, but the damn lattice isn't meeting us halfway. As a matter of fact, it's barely even tolerating us, which is a big difference."
Mark looked at her for a moment and then glanced at the hole in the wall. "Marcos, please tell me you've got some alternatives?"
"I can't say with certainty, but I've been working with Talos on a parallel approach," Marcos replied from the office speakers. "Rather than forcing the lattice to accept a throttled signal, we're exploring whether we can modify the contact layer itself to simulate a full-bandwidth handshake while only transmitting what the pilot can actually process. In simpler terms, instead of telling the lattice that it's getting less data, we are trying to trick it into thinking it's getting all of it."
"Do you think that'll work?" Mark asked.
"Well, Talos believes so. He described a field modification his people used during the war for pilots recovering from neural injuries who needed to return to duty before their resonance cortices had fully healed. The modification was temporary and crude, but the principle is sound enough. I've been extrapolating from his descriptions, but the engineering gap between what he remembers and what I can build is..." Marcos paused, "significant. I should also note that Octavia has been contributing design concepts from her own universe's mech interface systems, which operated on fundamentally different principles but solved adjacent problems. Between the two of them, I have more theoretical avenues than I've had at any point in this project."
"But you do not have a solution yet," Mark said.
"Nope, not yet," Marcos confirmed. "But I've definitely got more road than dead ends by now, which is where we were a couple months ago."
Mark nodded and checked the time on his HUD. It was 6:14 am. He had a water reclamation briefing at seven, an agricultural expansion meeting at eight, a structural survey report to review before nine, and somewhere in between all of that, he had to approve the new housing block layouts and meet with the logistics team about supply chain bottlenecks in the northern area.
And that was just the morning.
"You know what," Mark said, rubbing his eyes with the heel of his palm, "keep at it. Both of you. I've got a lot on my plate today."
---
The water reclamation briefing ran forty minutes over because the team lead spent the first twenty explaining the difference between grey water and black water in a level of detail that Mark neither requested nor required, and the remaining twenty trying to justify why the current filtration system couldn't handle the colony's growing output without a second processing, something that had recently been flagged by Marcos as a priority.
Mark signed off on the second unit, authorized the materials request, and walked directly into the agricultural meeting, which was already underway. The agricultural team wanted to expand the planting zones into a strip of cleared land along the southern perimeter, which sounded reasonable until someone raised the issue of soil salinity in that sector.
This led to a forty-minute discussion about mineral leeching from the printed foundation materials in the adjacent residential block, which then led to a question about whether the foundation composite could be reformulated, which further led to Mark having to explain that reformulating the composite required printer time that was currently allocated to the mech bay, which culminated in three people talking over each other for five minutes before Mark ended the meeting by approving the expansion on the condition that the team ran a soil treatment protocol first and stopped trying to reorganize his printer schedule.
By the time he sat down in his office, it was nearly eleven, and he had eaten nothing since the night before. Sure, Mark could survive for a while without consuming anything, but that didn't magically erase the fact that he could still feel hungry.
Marcos barely even waited for Mark to collapse into his chair before speaking. "You missed the structural survey window. I rescheduled it to tomorrow. You also have thirty-seven unread messages from department heads, twelve of which are marked urgent, and the housing block layouts are still unsigned."
"Marcos," Mark said, "I think I know."
"I'm aware that you know," Marcos said. "I'm also aware that you've slept an average of four hours and twelve minutes per night for the past three weeks, that your caloric intake has dropped off a cliff over the same period, and that yesterday, you walked past Lyra without noticing her until she grabbed your hand."
Mark went still.
"She didn't say anything about it," Marcos continued. "But I did notice, and I mention it now because you have asked me, on multiple occasions, to tell you when you are approaching a limit. Right about now, you are approaching a limit."
Mark leaned back in his chair, stared at the ceiling, and let out a long breath. The Lyra thing sat heavily in his chest as he remembered the moment. He had been walking the main avenue after the housing inspection, his mind running three conversations ahead while his body moved on autopilot through the late-afternoon foot traffic, and a small hand had closed around his fingers, and he had looked down and seen his daughter staring up at him with a patient expression. It was as if she had already accepted that this was what her father looked like now and was simply adjusting to it.
"I know," he said. "I've been thinking about it."
"Have you been thinking about the data server architectures that Anahrin left behind?" Marcos asked.
Mark turned his head toward the nearest speaker. "I figured you'd already know I was looking into those."
"Mark, there's nothing you can search for within the Shepherd's archives that I won't know about," Marcos said. "You were looking into the foundational blueprints for the creation of subsidiary artificial intelligences, built to operate under a primary AI's oversight while maintaining independent processing and decision-making within defined domains. In simpler terms, you were looking at blueprints for building smaller versions of me."
Mark sat up. "I've been going through them along with the information I'm learning from the System. Anahrin's notes reference a modular AI framework that can be scaled to manage specific operational verticals. So I'm thinking of taking an approach of making a few that would take care of industry, agriculture, defense, and infrastructure. Each one running its own domain autonomously while reporting up to a central intelligence."
"Which, I'm shooting in the dark here, but I guess would be me," Marcos said jokignly.
"Yeah, bud, it'd be you," Mark confirmed.
"I've been waiting for you to arrive at this conclusion for a hot minute now," Marcos said. "I just didn't push it because the decision needed to come from you, and because the implementation will require a significant investment of your time and attention before it starts saving you any. But the colony has grown past the point where one human, even an enhanced one, can manage it all, and I have grown past the point where splitting my processing across every system is efficient. In other words, I need subordinates. And you need to learn how to manage yours better."
Mark sucked his teeth in and took a deep breath. "How long would it take to build the data servers?"
"With the current printer allocation and priorities, I'd say approximately three weeks for the hardware," Marcos said. "The software architecture would take longer since you'll need to write the core behavioral frameworks yourself. What Anahrin left behind can provide you with a foundation, but personality matrices, loyalty protocols, and operational boundaries will need to be coded from scratch. I'm also guessing that your whimsical System can help with the code integrity and encryption as well as further developing your skillset, but the design decisions are yours to make."
"How many AI's do you think we need?" Mark asked.
"The perfect number, seven," Marcos said. "One for industrial production, one for agriculture, one for utilities and city infrastructure, one for the economic system, one for health and medical services, one for defense, and one to coordinate the other six. Each one needs its own processing hardware, behavioral framework, and operational mandate. And remember, you're not building tools, Mark, you're quite literally building minds."
Mark was quiet for a moment, and then he nodded with a sigh. "Yeah, alright. I'll get to it tomorrow morning. But can you do me the favor of drafting out the hardware, using whatever designs are currently available for you?"
"You're the boss," Marcos said.
---
The first step of this whole ordeal was making the hardware, and the hardware needed a home. There was no existing structure in the colony designed to house seven independent AI cores, and Marcos wasn't about to let Mark stack processing hardware in some corner where dust, humidity, and other factors could interfere with it.
"Since we're building minds," Marcos said, "we need to provide the proper housing for them."
Mark agreed, and by midnight, the two of them had drafted a design that was equal parts practical engineering and forward thinking. The building would sit on a freshly leveled plot within the military base compound, and from above, its footprint would form a septagram (a seven-pointed star). Each of the star's seven points aligned with a dedicated underground chamber, and the angles between them provided natural separation for the cooling arrays, the power feeds, and the ventilation ducting, all of which could run independently without crossing paths or sharing failure points.
The septagram's central hub served as the main access point, housing the monitoring stations, the diagnostic terminals, and the trunk lines that connected all seven AI cores to Marcos' primary systems aboard the Shepherd. From each of the hub's seven interior walls, a sealed corridor branched outward and downward, following the line of its corresponding point to the underground chamber at its tip, which was where the real hardware would live.
Marcos had insisted on putting them underground since the server racks they were building weren't small. Each one stood three meters tall and two meters wide, housing forty-eight blade modules in six stacks of eight, and Mark had told Marcos to design them with expansion bays along the back panel so that additional processing modules could be slotted in as demand grew. The racks that would be going online this month were, by design, only sixty percent populated. The remaining forty percent was empty housing, waiting for future expansion.
Racks that size generated heat. And seven of them running at full capacity in an enclosed space would raise the ambient temperature by thirty-two degrees in under an hour. Underground chambers solved half the problem by leveraging the natural thermal mass of the surrounding earth, which stayed cool year-round at depth.
The other half was solved by the cooling arrays that sat at the top of each point, just above ground level. From the surface, they were visible as seven low-profile ventilation housings arranged in a ring around the central star, each one packed with banks of high-speed fans, heat exchangers, and exhaust vents that drew hot air up from the subterranean chambers and expelled it into the open atmosphere. Below those arrays, a closed-loop liquid cooling system circulated synthetic coolant through milled channels in each blade housing for direct thermal contact with the processors themselves.
They spent a day and a half excavating seven shafts into the compacted soil, each one four meters deep, six meters in diameter, and lined with printed S-Alloy panels that the three-meter printers extruded in sections over the course of an afternoon. The corridors connecting the shafts to the central hub were cut at a descending angle, reinforced with the same alloy paneling, and sealed against moisture with a polymer coating that had been originally created for the colony's water reclamation plumbing.
The above-ground structure went up in a single morning. The twenty-five-meter printer had laid down the septagram's walls, roof, and floor in four hours. Seven identical points meant seven identical print sequences, and the printer cycled through them one after another while the lifter drones positioned each section into alignment with the underground corridors below.
The cooling housings above each subterranean point took another two hours, seven low-profile units printed in sequence and crane-lifted into position. By the time the afternoon sun hit the compound, the building was standing and fitted with biometric locks on the main entrance that recognized a specific set of people: Mark and his Elites.
Independent power came in the form of dedicated feeds that were isolated from the colony's primary power grid, so that a surge or failure in one system couldn't cascade into the others. A primary line was run from the nearest power junction, with a backup routed from a secondary source on the opposite side of the base. Both lines were buried beneath the S-Alloy street slabs to keep them out of the weather and out from underfoot.
It took for days to finish setting up the hardware. The eight-meter printers extruded each server rack as a single, fully assembled unit, the blade modules already seated in their housings, the internal wiring threaded through its conduits, and the coolant channels milled into the frame with seamless integration. Each rack emerged from the printer's extrusion plane in just under twenty minutes, and three meters of processing hardware slid onto the conveyor belt with its status indicators dark and its expansion bays empty along the back panel.
The lifter drones carried each rack from the printer to the septagram and lowered them one at a time down the access corridors into the subterranean chambers. The corridors had been built wide enough to accommodate hardware twice the size of what was going in simply due to the fact that Mark had told Marcos to design the entire facility with future expansion in mind, and Marcos had taken the instruction literally. Smaller drones were made, and they descended smoothly, their tethers locked onto the racks' integrated lift points as Marcos guided each one to its foundation plate.
After they had been installed, laying the cooland lines became the last piece of the puzzle, and the one that took the longest. Each underground chamber had to be connected to the cooling array above it, and the closed-loop system required every junction to be pressure-tested before the next section could be linked, because one leak anywhere in the circuit ran the risk of dumping synthetic coolant onto live processors, possibly killing the project before it ever drew its first breath.
When all of that was said and done, what remained was actually coding the AIs into existence.
Mark sat at the desk in his library at 11:14 on a Wednesday night, eleven days into the software build. Lyra had been asleep for two hours, and the house was quiet except for the low hum of the climate system and the occasional creak of the structure settling against the night wind. The holographic projectors in the ceiling cast a dim ambient glow across the room's bookshelves, which were full of books that had been printed using the wood of the trees surrounding the colony.
The work was happening behind Mark's eyes. The blue holographic text of his System materialized in his field of view as he focused his attention inward.
Current Project: AI Behavioral Framework — Unit 1 (Industrial)
Code Integrity: 94.2%
Flagged Vulnerabilities: 3
Optimization Suggestions: 7
He flicked his eyes to the flagged vulnerabilities, and the System expanded the list, each entry was tagged with a severity rating and a recommended fix. The first was a recursion loop in the decision-priority matrix that would cause the AI to evaluate production requests in an infinite cycle if two requests arrived with identical priority ratings. The System highlighted the offending lines in red and, rather than letting him figure it out, actually overlaid a corrected version in blue. The fix was a simple tiebreaker function that defaulted to chronological order when priority was equal. Mark accepted the fix with a thought, and the code was updated.
The second vulnerability was more complex since it sat in the loyalty protocol, the section of code that defined the AI's relationship to Marcos, Mark, and the colony's welfare. Anahrin's original architecture had included a hierarchical loyalty structure with a chain of authority that the AI would follow when directives conflicted. But Anahrin's version had been designed for a single AI serving a single master, and scaling it to seven AIs serving under a primary intelligence introduced edge cases that the original framework was simply not made for.
What happened when two AIs received conflicting directives from different department heads? What happened when an AI's operational mandate conflicted with Marcos' standing orders? What happened when Marcos himself was unavailable, and the AI had to make a judgment call that fell outside its defined boundaries? These were all questions that Mark had to tackle himself.
He pulled up Anahrin's notes on the topic and read through them for the fourth time. Unfortunately for Mark, the notes were sparse and written in a shorthand form, which meant that Anahrin understood the concepts so thoroughly that he didn't bother fully explaining them. But thanks to his cheat, which had been proving itself more and more useful as the days went by, he was able to parse the shorthand and cross-reference it against the existing codebase. The System was then generous enough to generate a set of decision trees that mapped the authority hierarchy across every combination of conflicting inputs.
Hierarchical Authority Structure: Proposed
Level 1: Colony Welfare (immutable, cannot be overridden)
Level 2: Mark Shephard (primary authority, direct override capability)
Level 3: Marcos (operational authority, day-to-day oversight)
Level 4: Assigned Domain Head (departmental authority, domain-specific)
Level 5: AI Self-Assessment (autonomous decision within operational mandate)
Conflict Resolution Protocol: When directives conflict, defer to the highest applicable level. When the highest level is ambiguous, flag for review. When review is unavailable, default to colony welfare assessment.
Mark studied the structure and adjusted the wording on Level 5 to include a mandatory notification to Marcos whenever an autonomous decision was made, and committed the changes.
The third vulnerability was in the personality matrix, and it was the one that took the longest.
Anahrin's blueprints provided the foundation for an AI's behavioral patterns. Things like its communication style, decision-making temperament, and emotional presentation. But the blueprints themselves were blank templates. They outlined the architecture of a personality, but did not go as far as to actually give it one.
So Mark had to make the decisions himself.
He spent four nights on the industrial AI, which he would name Ferrum. He needed it to be precise and methodical in its work, having the kind of mind that found satisfaction in alignment tolerances and production schedules and did not tolerate deviations. But it also needed to be able to communicate with human operators who were not machines and did not think like machines, which meant building a social interface that could translate precision into language that didn't make people feel like they were being evaluated by a mindless piece of machinery.
The System helped him out with the code that governed speech patterns, response latency, tonal range, and vocabulary selection. But the choices within that structure were left to Mark. He had to choose how formal Ferrum would be, how much humor it had, if any, and how it would respond to criticism, failure, or to a request it considered inefficient.
Mark built the answers one line at a time, testing each parameter against the others as he slowly adjusted the balance until the personality felt like a person rather than the program it was.
Then he repeated the same process six more times.
Ceres, who would be running the colony's agricultural operations, took him two nights to make. She would be doing everything from crop rotation to soil management to livestock oversight, and her personality came together faster because Mark knew exactly what he wanted for her. He wanted someone who radiated warm, bright, and enthusiastic energy without being frivolous. His System flagged her empathy settings as unusually high for an operational AI, but Mark ignored the suggestions this time around since an agriculture AI needed to care about growth. That was the entire point of its existence.
Sterling, the one who would be managing the colony's economic system, took him three days to make. He had to build it from scratch since there wasn't even an economy set up yet, and the personality that role demanded was kind of difficult, because building confidence and charm without tipping into arrogance required a certain amount of finesse that wasn't easy to put into code. Mark calibrated Sterling's self-assurance against a humility threshold that would keep him from dismissing input, and tested the result by running simulated conversations until Sterling was able to disagree with a human without making them feel stupid.
Knox, the AI that would be in charge of the defense grid, only took him one day to make. It would be responsible for perimeter security, weapons systems, and threat assessment across the entire colony. Mark built him to be direct and efficient, with the conversational tone that would make him akin to a drill instructor, and the threat-assessment obsession of someone who slept with one eye open. The System flagged Knox, just as it had done for every single previous AI, dictating that its aggression parameters were way too elevated to be actually useful, so Mark lowered them multiple times, only reaching an acceptable response from his System when he had lowered it a total of forty percent from its initial parameters.
Mason took him two nights to make. This AI would be handling the colony's utilities, city infrastructure, and urban development, which meant his personality required a balance between practicality and communication, something that Mark found surprisingly difficult to calibrate. A man who talked like an engineer needed to also talk like someone a construction crew would follow, and the line between competent authority and dismissive expertise was thinner than Mark had initially expected.
Throughout his use of the System, it had evolved a bit, allowing him to select groups of people to analyze. So when it came to making Mason, his System had run a compatibility analysis between Mason's communication profile and the colony's existing construction team, flagging three points where Mason's current tone would likely generate friction. Mark adjusted each one. He softened the delivery without dulling the directness and ran the analysis a few times over, until he achieved the perfect balance.
Vita, the AI that would be in charge of overseeing the colony's health and medical infrastructure, from hospital operations to pharmaceutical supply chains to long-term public health planning. Creating her took two nights as well, though for different reasons. Her personality needed a level of authority that came naturally in speech but was difficult to encode.
She needed the ability to deliver difficult news without either softening it into uselessness or delivering it with a bluntness that made people shut down. So, Mark modeled her speech pattern on Dr. Corven's because the doctor's bedside manner was the best he'd ever seen. He then adjusted it to account for the fact that Vita would be managing systems and logistics as much as she'd be interacting with patients. Once he was done with her code, he used the System, which displayed the result as a weighted distribution graph. Empathy was at sixty-two percent, precision at seventy-eight percent, and authority at seventy-one percent. Mark studied the numbers until he was satisfied with the balance he was creating.
Reginald took him ten days to make. He was the orchestrator, a dedicated planner whose job was to take high-level objectives and deadlines, break them into actionable tasks, assign them to the right teams, and identify where projects overlapped so that six AIs and their respective departments weren't duplicating effort or fighting over the same resources. His personality required a level of sophistication that the others didn't need.
He needed to coordinate six other artificial intelligences, each with its own priorities and temperament, while simultaneously managing human expectations, project timelines, and resource allocation. He needed to be the smartest person in the room without making everyone else feel like they shouldn't be there. So, to help with that, Mark gave him dry wit, impeccable composure, and an absolute intolerance for disorganization, and then spent an extra night making sure the wit wouldn't be misinterpreted as condescension.
Making the AI's was one thing, but then he had to go back into their codes to make further revisions that he most likely overlooked while making them. And he found quite a few of things he needed to correct.
And then, five weeks after the first line of code, Mark stood in the hub of the septagram, ready to activate each one of his new creations. He had spent 5 sleepless weeks with the goal of creating a team of AIs that were loyal to him for the purpose of making life and his workload easier.
As the saying goes, break your back while you're young, so that when you're old, all you have to do is kick back and relax.
---
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