"Now that you have a place for the Gooblens to be, what do you intend to do next?" asked Olivia, following him back to the bridge with Granny and Kitteral in tow.
Old Motha had left to join up with the other Gooblens, and to organize them in starting a town where Dustin had dropped them off. He had promised to fetch them some ship remains to start playing with, at some point in the next week.
"I need to fix the hivemind. Every Uz'En has nanobots inside of them, and those bots need the hivemind to connect them all. The AI was able to hack it far too easy, so I need to fix that before I program a new one."
Reaching the bridge, he paused and looked around. It was really cramped with so many people in it. There were only two seats, which meant the other two would have to stand or sit on the equipment.
"Computer, how long will it take to remake the bridge to incorporate two more seats?" he asked, sliding into his seat and looking over the schematics the computer flashed for him.
"With the new power source for the nanobots, they can do more per nanobot, much quicker than before," said the ship computer.
"Good. Then start that once we arrive at the hivemind. I should be able to get most of what I need done, by the time it's complete."
"Understood."
The ship left the atmosphere if the Gooblen home world and headed over to the hivemind, on the other side of the sun. Dustin was already typing away furiously when they arrived. He had pulled up the basic programs for the hivemind, and was busy reprogramming it to notice all outside programs as hostile. It would also update itself to prevent any other programs from being able to out think itself. Never again would it be hacked like it had.
All around him, nanobots under the ships control, were disassembling the ships bridge and rebuilding it to allow for two more seats with monitors. Standing up, he moved past all of the construction, and the three people who stood in the doorway watching in amazement, heading towards the airlock.
"What are you doing?" asked Olivia, grabbing his arm as he moved past her.
"I'm checking on some things in the hivemind. There may be a way to prevent the complete deletion of its budding awareness, so as to prevent it from having to learn everything from scratch all over again. Plus, I need to make absolutely sure that AI doesn't have any lingering programs hiding in it, before I go to upload the new programming."
She nodded, letting go of him. He shook his head, trying to get back onto the train of thought he had before getting interrupted.
Pausing at the airlock, he began his transformation before slapping the open button, then swam over to the hivemind and diving into it.
The biggest problem he saw was that it was still open to attack from all sides. There was no physical barrier from infiltration. Being made up almost entirely of nanobots, anything could cause damage to the internal workings very easily. And no matter how many failsafe's he programmed into it, the hivemind would always have to worry about signals from outside attacking it. As he struggled with a solution, his mind wandered to when Olivia had shown up outside his father's ship, right after his father had saved him. The coincidence was just too much. Hadn't the ship made a comment about minerals in the asteroid belt preventing signals from being sent?
Dustin wondered if there were some way to utilize that, without preventing the hivemind from communicating with the nanobots.
Floating among the stillness of the dead hivemind, thinking, Dustin became aware of activity hidden deep below all of the programs. Diving down to investigate, he wondered if it were the AI or some remains of the hivemind itself. It was a repair program, from the hivemind, trying to fix itself. He floated there, watching in amazement as this tiny program tweaked a little here and a little there, until moving on to the next thing. At the rate of its progress, the hivemind would take several years to repair itself. But it was still there!
Not wasting any more time, Dustin began to search each program, using the processing power of his own brain, coupled with the processing power of the hivemind itself, to ensure that all traces of the AI were gone. The few strands he found were no longer functioning, and were wiped easily.
Pulling out of the hivemind, he flew back to the ship. There wasn't a moment to waste. He had to get those minerals before the hivemind became too much more aware. No one bothered him as he flew to his seat, barely bothering to change back into his normal form and instructed the ship to jump back to the asteroid belts.
The bridge was just finishing up when they appeared next to the floating asteroids.
"What are we doing back here for?" asked Granny.
"Minerals," said Dustin, before sending the nanobots out to start harvesting the signal blocking minerals.
Kitteral grinned as he realized what was going on. "That hivemind of yours getting fixed?"
"Soon!" beamed Dustin, watching the cargo hold fill up carefully. The new energy the ship used to jump with could only handle so much, so as soon as the hold was filled as full as he dared to let it, he pulled back all of the nanobots and jumped back.
Despite the obvious lack of activity in the hivemind, Dustin dumped the minerals into space around it, before flying back to it. He wanted to oversee and speed up its repair, while making sure it didn't glitch anywhere. The AI had done some pretty severe damage to some of the programs, and he wasn't about to let a missed period here or there, cause a hiccup. The future of his people depended on him.
Several hours later, the hivemind was busy with nanobots zooming all over the place, repairing bits and pieces and utilizing the minerals he had dumped, to form a carapace around the central mind, protecting it from all outside signals that might hack it again.
"Thank you, Dustin," said the hivemind, knowing he was there, despite him not programming a way for it to register him. Already it was progressing further than the AI had.
Some of the programs that had made up the AI were being utilized to upgrade his hivemind, and Dustin didn't mind at all.