After days of running simulations, Alexander finally figured out how to get the microorganisms to do what he wanted. At least partially. His eureka moment only arrived after he turned away from using a methodical approach to changes, because that wasn’t getting him anywhere. Every minor change had a ripple-down effect that he couldn’t predict. Instead, he embraced the chaos and threw random changes into the microorganism’s genetic code to see what worked.

  That wasn’t an ideal method, but he could address that problem later. He had a general understanding of the manufacturing method and now knew how to recreate it once he returned to Unokane. Right now, he needed to focus on building a ship to go home.

  If only it were that easy.

  “I’m short on materials,” he told Rush the next time he arrived.

  Rush frowned at that. “There should be more than enough materials on the station.”

  “Not according to the production request I submitted.”

  Alexander had been forced to build his printers aboard the Collective’s space station because building the ship on the planet would have been pointless. It would have been far too large to lift off once it was complete.

  Rush looked at the numbers, then went still for a moment.

  Alexander suspected that the man’s pause was more for his benefit, since he had seen Rush seamlessly communicating with his siblings before.

  Rush blinked, then turned to Alexander. “It seems deconstruction efforts were shifted ahead of schedule. I’ll go and speak with Twelve. He is responsible for removing our orbital facilities.”

  Alexander nodded but remained silent as he watched Rush scurry out of the room. What more could he do? After the previous setback brought on by some of Rush’s siblings, Alexander had made contingency plans.

  As it turns out, shifting his construction to the machines inside his old workshop was the right choice. Without direct oversight, and most of the Collective actively avoiding him, it had been easy to create a small group of multipurpose bots.

  He had to actively direct their work since they didn’t possess onboard processors, but it was worth it.

  Alexander first used the bots to map the part of the massive underground facility that he was in. They quickly located the gravity plating cavern, a grow house for organic compounds. Likely designed for the microorganisms and the carbon, which rivaled the gravity plating cavern in size, a convenient surface access ramp, and the massive elevator that traveled to and from the surface.

  So far, none of the other AIs had commented on his activities, but he doubted they had gone unnoticed. If he could multitask, they could probably do so much more effectively.

  Once he had a good idea of where he was in relation to certain features of the base, he set his printers to pumping out more multipurpose bots. They were now digging the production pit for his new ship. Yes, his backup plan was to build it on the ground, even with its impossibility to fly it to orbit under its own power.

  Alexander really didn’t have much of a choice. Without access to space, he wanted the Collective members, who seemed dead set against letting him leave, to see his actions as pointless.

  Physics backed up that assumption, which is why it was the perfect smokescreen. He used logic and facts to make the Collective underestimate him. Hopefully, that would make them ignore his other project.

  The fact of the matter was, it would have been simple to lift a ship off the surface. If he had managed to get his hands on the zero-gravity plating that the elevator seemed to rely on. He knew that was a long shot.

  Planning for that, Alexander made his own paired gravity plates. After Rush explained the concept to him, he realized it wasn’t all that hard to make small chunks of matter, about the size of a pinkie, that were quantum-linked.

  Scaling up was far more difficult because quantum drift set in rather quickly, and Alexander hadn’t quite figured out how to correct for that yet. The quantum drift wasn’t an issue with the comm nodes because those particles were housed in a containment field the moment they were created.

  While not ideal, he could still work with the smaller samples. Size didn’t matter for what he was planning, but he did need quantity. He set to work creating tiny transmitters and receivers from the linked pairs.

  Over the last week, he had been slipping them aboard the elevator, through equally tiny bots. He fully expected the Collective to recall the elevator into space at some point to deny him access to it, so he wanted to get as many aboard as possible to take advantage of the elevator’s generated fields.

  The plates didn’t care that they were retransmitting a gravity field. All they needed was the field to exist. When the elevator was activated, that field would be transferred to his receivers. Once activated, they would allow him to reduce the overall gravitational mass of the ship, allowing him to circumvent the thrust-to-weight ratio problem.

  There were a lot of what-ifs in that plan. Like, what if the Collective discovered the tiny transmitters? What if they dismantled the elevator before he was ready? What if they decided his recreation of the gravity plating was a step too far and killed him just for attempting it?

  Alexander’s plan had many issues, but it was the best one he had come up with so far. He had alternatives if the Collective caught on, but those were even more of a stretch. At least with the gravity plating, he had a high hope it would work. The test activations proved that the impromptu transmitters and receivers were working. The rest of the plan hinged on Rush and how much he was doing to keep his family from interfering.

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  ***

  Rush tapped his foot in annoyance as he rode the elevator off the surface, the hard light construct that maintained its position to the station glowed from above and below until it faded out against the dark backdrop of the planet and stars only a dozen feet from the elevator.

  One end of the projection was connected to the planet, while the other was positioned on the underside of the station. The projectors acted as anchors, but the actual construct didn’t need to be connected at all. It was a temporary support that helped guide the elevator, and that was all. He always thought there was so much more they could do with the technology, but it was hard enough convincing his siblings to explore their creator’s technology further. It had been a battle to convince them to create more ABMs. The only reason they agreed was the hope that more Collective members would be awoken from the effort.

  Their reticence against being reminded of their creator’s work should have been a sign of what to expect when he first told them he found Alexander Kane. One had been na?ve and optimistic at the time, but he could see it for the resentment that it was now.

  He nudged his foot against one of the tiny transmitters Kane had built and thought he had subtly hidden aboard the craft, and sighed. It vanished inside his form, and a duplicate was spat out once more near his sphere, which was hovering far from the planet’s gravitational pull. He strode around the elevator and cleaned up the rest of the transmitters.

  If one of his siblings had spotted the devices, they would have instantly understood what they were designed to do. With them being belligerent about Kane’s activities, One didn’t need to throw any more fuel on their fire.

  Eventually, the elevator clanked into the clamps aboard the station, and he stepped off, leaving no sign of Kane’s activities behind him.

  It didn’t take him long to locate Twelve. His brother had shed his human form once again and returned to his geodesic form that twisted and morphed constantly.

  “I thought the space station was the last scheduled orbital structure to be removed?” One asked casually.

  “We have reevaluated our priorities and found that the other sites can simply be deorbited instead of wasting time deconstructing them.”

  “We?” One asked. “I don’t recall getting an invitation to weigh in on such a major decision.”

  “You were occupied,” Twelve replied flatly.

  One swallowed his annoyance at being excluded. “I see. And what should I tell Kane? He was promised use of the station to build his ship so he could depart.”

  “That is incorrect. He was promised use of the station until we had to dismantle it. We are currently in the process of dismantling it, so he no longer has use of it.”

  “So that’s what we’ve become?” One chuckled. “A collection of misleading lies and false promises?”

  Twelve didn’t respond, One knew he wouldn’t.

  He shook his head. “You don’t even have an argument to justify your actions, do you?”

  Once again, he was met with silence.

  “Have it your way,” One said. “I’ll be calling a forum to discuss these blatant actions to prevent Kane from leaving.”

  After stating his intentions, One turned around and left the station.

  He suspected the forum would not find fault with Twelve’s actions, but maybe it would delay further meddling from them for a short while.

  ***

  Alexander spent the next two weeks working in absolute solitude. The silence gnawed at his mind. He found himself trying to ping Rush or other members of the Collective just to check if they were still around. He wouldn’t put it past them to just up and vanish without a word.

  They never pinged him back, but he was able to feel their attention shift his way for a moment before once again going silent.

  That was enough to keep him sane in the silence, but he really wondered what Rush was up to. He normally checked in every few days.

  The fact that he was completely absent made Alexander want to hurry his project along even faster, but unfortunately, there was nothing he could do to speed the growth process along. Not that it was slow by any means.

  Turns out growing a ship that was comparable in size to his Barracuda-Class battleship took far less time than it took his multipurpose drones to build the scaffolding that held the defensive field emitters in place.

  The entire outer hull was completed in three days, encasing the thrusters and reactor in the first layer of armor. Alexander didn’t go with anything fancy to conceal the thrusters from scans. The ship was going to be a warship, not a stealth recon vessel.

  Aesthetics were not a major concern. The ship was a mix of smooth curves and sharp faces, like the wreck that Fletcher had given him. It made the ship look a bit like a half-finished gemstone. It even glittered like one, thanks to the integrated fiber optics, which he had no way to manage until he installed an actual computer core.

  The upgrade that the Collective had given him certainly increased his processing and multitasking abilities, but it didn’t suddenly turn him into a supercomputer. While he was technically an AI, based on what Rush told him and what the videos confirmed, he didn’t feel like one.

  That probably had a lot to do with the fact that he was made using a partial copy of a human mind, and not deliberately designed as a data processing engine, like the Collective members were.

  From what he witnessed, the Collective had the inverse problem. They were well acquainted with processing data like a computer, but they had trouble when it came to blending in and understanding people.

  As interesting as their shared histories were, Alexander refocused his attention on the ship. The unnamed vessel had ten heavy laser turrets, similar to the Barracuda. It turned out that making high-end lenses and mirrors was rather easy using the microorganisms. The rest of the components he manufactured in his workshop.

  It was easy enough to do with his years of experience, and once done, he assembled the turrets and let his multipurpose bots move them into place.

  By the end of the third week, he still hadn’t heard anything from Rush, but the weapons were installed, and the changes he made to the ship design to add three layers of armor had finally been completed. All that was left was the interior of the vessel, which was honestly an afterthought.

  He knew his changes to the microorganisms had screwed up some of the interior bulkheads, but the changes were minor enough that they would not affect the ship’s operation. It was worth it to make room for the extra armor, the defensive field, and the energized armor he planned on stuffing into the vessel.

  Alexander would have included a ripple drive as well, but he didn’t have the computing power to manage that, while keeping his focus on the reactor. He also doubted the Collective would allow him to build one, considering they had stripped his living alloy of the ability to transition into subspace.

  It wouldn’t have worked anyway. There were no gas giants nearby, and he didn’t understand how the Collective’s method of subspace travel worked, so he couldn’t utilize that.

  That meant he installed a standard warp drive. The one recorded in his past self’s archives was so obsolete compared to the current version that was widely available within the STO that it wasn’t even funny. His past self’s one was slower, had a shorter travel distance, and was generally less efficient than newer models.

  Considering it was created nearly a hundred years ahead of humanity’s first attempt at FTL, he decided to give his past self a break on that front. That didn’t mean he was going to use the outdated FTL, however. He had standards, plus he knew how to build the newest models, so it was a moot point.

  Once the interior was complete and everything was in place, he would have to move fast. He got the distinct impression that not every member of the Collective would be happy to see him trying to leave.

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