[[3:21, Tuesday, 3rd of January, 3052.]]
From the imagined perspective of one from the outside, nothing had changed since the Machines awakening.
The gaping gash in the massive front gate had not been fixed or attended to; the vast loading Chambers within had nothing to march the presence of the awoken Machine; no emergency lighting, no attempts at repair. The strange limping shapes still scampered and scuttled on too many legs within the hallways and alleys, which was just as hopelessly dead as the myraid others like it.
But if there was one single change in the ecosystem of the Factory ruins, it would be that the shadows that moved and crawled through the darkness were no longer always living beings. Where these particular shadows moved, the other wildlife scuttled away, hissing and moaning with deformed vocal cords, the braver ones snapping out with jagged teeth at the newcomers. The new shadows did not scamper around with the same animalistic urgency, or twitch and groan with the weight of thousands of genetic idiosyncrasies, or even react to the hostilities of the other inhabitants, rather they moved with calm, unthinking purpose, and carried themselves rather steadily, impervious to all around it.
Some of them walked smoothly, others limped along empty hallways, dragging twisted metal behind them like a dead weight. Others were not so lucky; others had to crawl from mounds of skeletal corpses, mechanical fingers digging silver tally marks across the floor with each agonising pull. The destination of them all was varying in travel time, but all the same.
The Recreational Sector.
For they were the final remaining twenty-eight droids of the Factory, and they had been awakened by the reborn Machine.
After the activation of Protocol 40, the order had been given to all working droids by the Machine to dismantle the most currently useless part of the factory, that being the Recreational Sector, and take the salvaged materials to the Refinery. The sprawling complex of Cafeterias, hospitals, Dormitories and Bathrooms served no real purpose anymore, as their original inhabitants were now the mummified skeletons that littered the floor.
And while the Sector was not spared from the ravages of time, rather they had suffered the most; caveins had collapsed swathes of the sprawling complex, with the ravages of time ransacking what was left, they still had great prospects for salvage.
When sufficient numbers were gathered within the Recreational Sector, the Droids got to work. Inbuilt half-faulty welders seared superalloy plating off the walls; steel tables and counters were partitioned and carted off to be melted down; time-ravaged furniture was disassembled for what useful resources they still had; what few dormant, broken droids encountered without a useful purpose was recycled for parts.
The Process had lasted twelve days, and despite the Droids constant laboring, only a minute portion of the Sector was actually dismantled. Although many centuries passed, and structural collapse had severely damaged the Sectors layout, it was still a vast sprawling labrynth that any serious attempt at disassembling it would be a herculean task, taking many months to accomplish with the current manpower the Machine possessed.
All resources gathered from the Sector was carted off to the barely, miraculously functioning Refinery (even the Machine was surprised it hadn't collapsed underneath its own titanic bulk yet.) The old reclaimed metals and alloys were scrubbed of rust, then simply thrown into the vast heating Chambers where the automated facilities took care of the rest; utilising arcane technology and half-forgotten sciences to create the neccesary alloys required.
What was being created was an alloy that the Machine only vaguely understood, not due to intellectual constraint, but that much of its former knowledge was lost to atrophy. What it could find within its ravaged memory banks spoke of a miraculous form of alloy, with the strength dozens of multitudes higher than that of steel, contained within half the weight, and nearly impervious to rust and decay. It's only true drawback was the vast amounts of resources required to create it.
The Machine did not know why it was creating such an alloy. One of its final orders from before its deactivation was the production of the specified superalloy, so in concordance with its millennia-old commands, it continued the production of the alloy. Perhaps, the probability matrix suddenly suggested, when the Machine reestablishes contact with its supervisors, they might be pleasantly surprised with the sight of the Factory's warehouses stocked with exactly 70 tons worth of superalloy plating.
Perhaps they might even be happy.
The Machine supervised the entire process, and within thirty minutes a white carpet of blazing hot superalloy steadily left the exit ports of the Refinery complex, to be cooled down and placed into storage for later usage.
The Factory, for the first time in a thousand years, was busy.
It may have been working at a minute fraction of its full potential, but it was still busy.
Perhaps busiest of all the Factory's inhabitants was the AI directing it. The only(?) sentient construct within the complex spent its time in perfect solace, its brain now bubblegum pink with reactivated blood flow, suspended inside its protective vat. From there, it micromanaged every single detail of the scavenging process, from the temperature the vast heating Chambers of the Refinery were set to, down to the perfect precision welds made on the walls and floors of the Recreational Sector. For a human being of a thousand years prior, It would have been an extremely stressful task, requiring entire teams of dozens worth of people.
But the Machine was no human being, but something created to do such tasks with ease. It thought at speeds eclipsing that of Sound, and was gifted with beyond-superhuman management and organisation skills.
If anything, the task was too simple.
So that was why it began multitasking; along with micromanaging the physical world outside, it invested even more time and labor within its mind. The Machine scoured through the fractured, torn remains of its memory in search of answers. It sifted through ancient folders and half-corrupted data-files, deciphering and relearning forgotten languages to aid in its search, as many of these files were written in strange languages it did not understand. For the briefest of moments the Machines search was interrupted by a Dull warning transmitted from Corridor 845#F. It partitioned its attention and turned a single reaction to the cameras within the Corridor. What it saw was a living tidal wave of flesh; rodent upon rodent surging through the width of the corridor in a terror-driven frenzy. They trampled on eachother, the weakest of the group buried under masses of many deformed appendages.
The Machine watched this play out with passive interest. It had witnessed this before; terrified by the awakening of the brain in the jar and the cyclopean golems that served it, the strange mutated wildlife had retreated deep into their nests. Its probability engine entertained the notion of exterminating them, only to cancel it out immediately afterwards.
For now, they shall not suffer extermination, not when things far more important than housekeeping were on the Machines mind, like the repair of the Relay.
The Repair of the Communications Relay was a challenge, to say the least.
The networking relay of radio antennas and ancient circuits, located on the highest levels of the Factory, was never the main form of communication — the Machines fragmented memory banks recalled how it used the Internet for all its communication purposes. The relay was purely for emergency purposes, as the Internet surpassed it in every way.
The mere act of getting to the Relay was a challenge in itself. For a human being, the sprawling factory would be hell to navigate through; the security cameras within all areas were damaged by atrophy or sometimes completely destroyed, and combined with the catastrophic damage caveins and wildlife infections caused, it required lots of speculation and careful planning to navigate a path to the highest levels. What few automatons the Machine had in its possession struggled greatly in the journey, not due to mistakes but deficiencies brought on by their ancient hardware. The journey took almost an entire day, and no more than five droids were lost; two succumbing to critical malfunctions, while the three took a much stranger route out. The Machine remembered it in vivid, perfect detail; how it thumped onwards through the myraid, emergency-red lit hallways of the upper levels like the rest, until it suddenly stopped, it's camera staring deep into a divergent hallway, unsupervised by cameras and cloaked in shadow.
The droid made no warning or announcement of its treason like a defective unit usually does — it simply turned and steadily walked into the darkness.
When the Machine noticed its dissapearance a nanosecond later and tried to halt its movement, it found that its signal had been lost.
Confused, the Machine let the expedition continue onwards, but ordered a pair of droids to pursue the seemingly detached unit into the darkness. When they thumped onwards into the dark, their signals did the exact same thing as the previous droid did; cut out without explanation or reason. At once, the Machine recognised the possible danger this section of the facility posed. Whatever was within threatened its control.
Now, the entire east section of the Fifteenth had been designated Exclusion Zone #0, and all movement within 40 feet of it had been prohibited. So far, no more malfunctions had been reported.
And while the challenges faced by the Machine were great, they were not unconquerable; the Exclusion Zone could be avoided; stairways could be cleared; Elevators could be jump-started; the labrynthine upper levels could be traversed given time. Within the span of an hour, the remaining Droids had reached the very highest level of the Factory, where the Relay was.
Many aspects of the world were entirely foregin to the Machine, but it knew Computer Science and Mathematics like the back of its metaphorical hand, so repairing the ravaged internal computer components was trivial; it didn't require anything spectacular, like innovation or creative input. What the Machine did was use scavenged components from PDAs and electronic devices that lay around the Recreational sector to repair the many components of the Relay.
The process had taken a day.
And after that day, the fruits of the Machines labor had been rewarded at last. The Relay was operational once more, utilising a myriad of cobbled together electronics to function. The Machine routed a single scavenged power-cable to the Relay, and it quickly powered up.
EMERGENCY COMMS.RELAY: OPERATIONAL
If the Machine possessed a Mouth, or didn't see the action as an inane, confusing emotional expression of a presumably long-dead species, it would have smiled.
And now came the question of who to contact.
The Machine considered the question seriously. Its first logical step was to scan on all frequencies for signs of lifelife within the operation radius. It did so, sending the order to the Relay, which complied immediately.
It scanned, and on all frequencies, Static answered.
...
That was odd. The Relay has an operational range of 250 miles — it should have picked something up. Hoping that this was some technical error, the Machine tried again — the results were the same.
In responses the Machine trained the communications relay eastward, in the direction of the vast city ruins, in the hope that the scans would pick up something or someone.
Like an old friend the Static answers. A deafening cacophony of absolute nothingness.
And for the first time, the Machine felt fear. The probability matrix within its core was overwhelmed with Millions upon millions of questions, some of them terrifying even the Machine.
Looking into its memory banks for answers once more, the Machine searched with renewed desperation. It performed the digital equivalent of upturning an entire office, searching through countless terabytes for anything that could assist it. It searched for a full minute, the equivalent of months, through its fractured memory, and seemingly found nothing. Yet right before the Machine lost all hope, it remembered something.
The distress call. The message that had caused it to reactivate in the first place. Quickly the Machine recalled it from memory, replaying it.
"Is... Is anybody out there? Please. Send help. Please."
Intently the Machine examined the message. Quickly it found the coordinates of the Sender.
And in that single moment, the Machine felt the closest thing it could feel to absolute relief and joy. Quickly processing the coordinates, it found that the messages origin came from a location to the far East, lying beyond the vast Mountains.
Hoping against hope, it tuned the relay to focus on the East, concentrating on the spot where the Coordinates hailed from.
The Machine almost broke into artificial despair as the Scan came back as static, until it registered something else. A gentle beep.
For the first few moments, the Machine couldn't believe what was happening. A nanosecond passed, and it immediately jumped on the beeping, focusing vast swathes of its attention on the signal.
It was a faint little thing, barely detectible already. Anything less than a concentrated scanning on that single location wouldn't have turned up anything. And while the Machine was slightly confused that only one emergency radio was still active, it was nevertheless overjoyed to not be alone in the World.
Immediately, the Machine had a message sent to the spot.
It began with the usual assortment of ones and zeroes that made up any intelligent transmission, followed by an automated message, detailing the Machines situation, co-ordinates, and requests for more details on their own situation.
Silence.
And then, exactly one second later, a reply.
The Machine was prepared to wait days, months, or even years just for a response, so when it received a nearly instantaneous reply it was overjoyed. It considered the likelihood of a repeated message, but at this point it didn't care.
The Machine opened the message without the faintest doubt in its security and-
WARNING!
MALICIOUS PROGRAM DETECTED!
ORIGINS: EMERGENCY COMMS.RELAY
FILE NAME: DIE.HP5
SENDER: [ERROR: DATA NOT FOUND!]
CONDUCTING SYSTEM PURGES...
...
...
...
URGENT WARNING!
[ANTIVIRUS SOFTWARE COMPROMISED!]
[REMOTE DATA OVERRIDE IN EFFECT!]
[ABORT?]
[ABORTION PROCEDURES ACTI-]
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[[[...]]]
[[[[ ABORTION PROCEDURES HALTED.]]]]
[[[[ REMOTE DATA OVERRIDE INITIATED.]]]]
[[[[ EST TIME: 52 SECONDS. ]]]