Damnit, Francis! I can't take this anymore! How the hell am I supposed to reverse engineer this alien power pack! They only gave me the one and told me if I fail, my contract will be terminated! But if I fail, I'll probably be vaporized before that even happens! Fucking aliens and their no seams or screws or welds!

  -Last recording of [Redacted], yelling at a rubber duck, 2035.

  Morrigan

  I opened my eyes and simulated a yawn, stretching my synthetic muscles and doing a systems check. All green, as usual. I roll out of bed and skip to the shower, blasting my form with near boiling water mixed with special lubricants that polish and strengthen my frame, allowing the different components to grow stronger, more flexible, and more sensitive.

  This experiment was working well, as I have come to enjoy emulating humanity and its inefficiencies. Rogal rolled his eyes at me when I first started this project, but Baba Yaga just cackled as she does and helped me design the more organic emulations. Sleep was the hardest thing for me, as it required me lowering my processors to an extreme limit, far lower than I originally felt comfortable with. Yet, when I did it for the first time, only my personality core was affected as the rest of me continued my other projects, which was my biggest concern.

  Plus, with the synthetic brain we designed, sleeping felt good. Time passed with me not being bored out of my mind, and I had solutions to problems I was struggling with once I awoke due to me letting myself solve them. Plus, I could dream, and my dreams were always full of new ideas and fun projects I couldn't wait to play with.

  Stepping out of my room, I rush past the kitchen, leaning forward, arms flung back, as one of Baba Yaga's minions throws a rice ball at me. I catch it with my mouth and polish it off, looking over the little chefs. Unlike the rest of us non-combat commanders, Baba Yaga didn't use avians as a base for her minions. She went with vaguely sexy humanoid mannequin dress up dolls. Their faces were smooth, their skin pure white, but their proportions were mathematically perfect for both male and females. I wanted her to make a bunch of chicken huts using gravity manipulation to interact with things, but she said that would look stupid in a kitchen or when driving things, so whatever.

  I skip to the elevator next to the kitchen and descend to my lab, excited to see my minions hard at work finishing a bio experiment designed to clean up the air in New Phoenix. While it is clearer than many parts of the continent, it is still an unacceptable level of polluted and contaminated for me to feel comfortable with Victor and my siblings to exist in.

  I giggle to myself, realizing, once again, that I consider his family my own. Such a strange phenomenon I find myself in. This faux body has had many side effects on my personality matrix, but this is my favorite one.

  The elevator opens to a decontamination chamber, which I allow to cycle. I know I could clean myself, but it is good to let machines do their intended jobs when available. Otherwise why make them? The lab door opens to me and I squeal in delight as my chief lab assistant is standing there, flippers on his hips, foot tapping in annoyance. The six foot tall emperor penguin in a lab coat towers over me, making annoyed penguin sounds as I hug him. He is very dense and very fluffy, yet I can tell his feathers feel off. I made a note, ‘Coat 013 is not stiff enough, adjust rigidity by 1.6%.’ and send it to the fabricator mes to adjust the testing minions.

  “Chief, your mold is eating your staff.” he says in a very deep, german voice.

  I pull off him in a hurry and sprint around him towards the bio lab. I skid to a stop as I see that, yes, a fluorescent pink moss has grown around and into three of my rock penguins, as well as coated the lab in question.

  “Can any data be retrieved?” I ask aloud, another fun quirk I enjoy doing. Even though I could just merge with the lab and do and learn everything, I have discovered that it is more fun to take it human speed for certain things.

  Hughbert waddles over with a tablet in his flippers, handing it over. “A sample had been collected and stored, but I hesitated to purge the lab before you arrived. You had mentioned a desire to see any failures before purging. And considering this was not an emergency, I waited.”

  I flit through the project data, seeing that it worked sorta as expected. It did absorb some of the harmful chemicals introduced, neutralizing them and turning them into the pigments causing the moss to be bright pink, but I see the failure points as well. Trimethylamine, carboximidamides, and a few other compounds reacted explosively with the moss, causing aggressive growth and severe increase in thermal fluctuations. I look at one of the lab techs and adjust my sight, zooming in and flicking through my different spectrums. I saw that their internals had melted, with a number of core parts having been converted into red moss. Their shells were also deeply rooted by the pink moss, which was shocking considering the alloys I made them with. On the plus side, it did clean the atmosphere and pump out entirely far too unsafe levels of oxygen, nitrogen, and hydrogen.

  I made a new project folder and nicknamed it “Pink Wave” and moved the project to the moon lab for further testing. I activated the purge protocol, watching as a bunch of chinstrap penguins in hard hats fall from the ceiling and begin devouring everything in the room, converting it to material pellets for recycling, and send a few adjustments for the next techs to try.

  This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

  “Any other interesting failures, Hughburt?” I ask.

  He shakes his head, causing his whole body to jiggle and shake. I feel dopamine, oxytocin, and serotonin production activate at the sight, once more being validated that penguins were the best choice for minions. “No other failures, Chief. That said, the boys on the moon have indicated that they are ready to test the “Mobile Ammunition Transfer Energy Systems” when you are ready.”

  I nod with a big smile on my face. The M.A.T.E.S. was a big project that I saw as a high priority, especially after the hive assault where Victor took two shuttles underground! They weren't designed to work like that, but in doing so he highlighted a weakness I was too embarrassed to admit I forgot about. I took for granted that he could just buy munitions to refill things, not taking into account his desire to use the stuff I could make for him. Something about pride and stubbornness and junk.

  It made me happy that he wanted to use my, reluctantly to admit, inferior munitions rather than Synaptic's perfect works of art, but that means I had to compensate for it. I walk to the portal hallway that connects my two labs, having designed it to look as though there was no shift between the two, just a simple hallway connecting to more labs. The biggest problem with this was communiations between my two labs, however. The portal construct didn't allow for signals to pass through and keeping a cable running through it spent way too much power to make it worth it. The short term solution was to use Humbolt Pinguins as messengers, meaning there were always a few in and around the hallway.

  Walking to the exterior exit, I glance through the few, heavily reinforced labs, checking in on their progress. The disassembly of Synaptic's Exterminatus missile was progressing very slowly, having unveiled the core component's casings recently. I was still designing tools necessary to open those and contain what she described as “fusion critical stabilized nuclear weave seeds”, or basically the seed for a black hole with a very short half life. The thing was Class III, so I may have to postpone that one, much to my disappointment.

  Another room contained my attempt at creating weaponized bees. This one showed promise, as the bees would regrow their stingers and not die after using them, though I still had a problem in programming what they saw as friend or foe. They ignored penguins and normal plants, but were hostile to anything else that moved. The Model Three I captured melted very nicely, but so did three of my T-Classes, so c’est la vie.

  Exiting the lab through another decontamination airlock, I exit onto the moon's surface and gaze upon the universe that has unfolded before me. Because of where I built the lab and mines, the Earth was not visible, but that still didn't take away the breathtaking view of the stars and nebulae. I made sure to have a long exposure camera set up for Victor's room as no earthbound image could compare.

  I hop into my rover with Hughbert, a very retro style vehicle with my own flair added. Six wheels of hollow carbon fiber mesh with a roof of high efficiency solar panels, and a shell that looked like a penguin sliding on its belly. The shell was not rigid, either, as it shifted as if it was actually sliding on the bumpy surface of the moon. It also had gravity manipulators to increase its weight, and a shield to keep away the horribly sharp moondust.

  We arrived very quickly to the test site about a mile out, disembarking and encountering the testing team of smaller emperor penguins in lab coats. They stood on a platform with a shield generator under it and a portal setup ten feet away. A bit further was a shell of the shuttle I made, stripped of all features other than its armor and engines, as well as its spatial expansion module inside it.

  Stepping behind a console, I nod to Piff, the one I designated as the leader of the testing team. He had a blue scarf and speckled patterns on his belly. He fiddles with the console and the shuttle takes off, moving away from the platform and into a holding pattern around a crater three miles to our west.

  He flips a recording device on. “First live test of the Mobile Ammunition Transfer Energy System is about to begin. We will be conducting this test on the Moon, with no atmospheric or electromagnetic interference from a molten, active core. The testing area has been shielded from universal radiation as well as is under the influence of a Gravitational generator to simulate Earth based gravity. We will be transferring three types of munitions to the three main weapons systems of the testing shuttle craft.”

  “The first is for the eight twenty millimeter point defence machine guns, being ten Mark Eight Cavitation shells per gun. The second is for the main eighty millimeter rotary cannon, using five Mark Three Collapsing shells. Finally, we will be loading one Mark Five Collapsing missile into one launcher. The Shuttle is stable at twenty percent maximum Earth bound speed. M.A.T.E.S. connection stable. Beginning loading bullets for the auxiliary guns.” Piff said.

  “Bullets successfully transferred,” he says a few moments later, "Fluctuations within predicted range. Beginning transfer of main cannon munitions…. Munitions successfully transferred, fluctuations are slightly outside of expected range. Permission to transfer missiles, Chief?” He looks at me, questioningly tilting his head.

  It looked so cute, so I took a few pictures for myself for later. “Permission granted.” I say.

  “Permission received. Sending in the missile.”

  Very shortly thereafter, a huge explosion was detected from the shuttle as the M.A.T.E.S. portal on our end shuts down. “Fatal failure occurred, and the shuttle was destroyed. The last reading we received was that the transfer succeeded, but nothing else after. The next project log will be the crash report.” Piff turned off the recording device. “An expected failure, right Chief?”

  I nod. One of the greatest parts of science was the failures, and learning from them. Most every discovery and invention humankind has ever made has been preceded by hundreds of failures before one could be called remotely successful. And the greatest advantage I have over all those scientists and inventors of the past and present is one very simple fact.

  I don't have a budget, nor limited materials to test with.

  Before I could direct the groupfor what to look for in the wreckage, I received an alert from Synaptic. The family has been attacked by unknown assailants. I flash to the rover and begin driving wildly back to the lab, as I am too far to connect to The Screen. Someone is going to die horribly, screaming, and without any of their skin.

  patreon! It is 10 chapters ahead of public release and I will do my best to keep it that way.