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[[[] INTERNAL CHRONOMETER NOT RESPONDING! []]]
....
The Machine woke up instantly, the life support flaring into existence, and bringing the Organic brain that made up most of its functions out of stasis. It woke up to a silent room. The floor littered with pale white skeletons.
... It didn't remember the room having skeletons.
Less than a second later, it had realised something was wrong. Immediately, the barely awoken Logic Engine of the Machine jumped to life to solve the problem. Countless strands of binary and all forms of programming language ran back and forth across the silicon mind of the machine, transmitting streams of algorithms and potential answers. Every available server and probability matrix was devoted to figuring out the problem at hand. This problem wasn't exactly a physical one, or, to a human mind, even important. It wasn't even the heavy damage brought upon the entire factory by the slow crawl of time.
It was the absolute silence that greeted the machine. That was the problem.
There was no constant stream of orders sent from its human administrators. No never-ending series of tasks to do. Not even the soft beeping of security drones accompanied it. Only a cold, unfathomably dead silence. And it didn't know why.
Deciding to try and take action, it diverted power to the Chronometer. Its many clocks got to work, trudging through countless terabytes of vital information, eventually digging up a rough estimate of the time.
+18:52, Monday, 21st December, 3051.+
Digging through more proverbial heaps of data-junk, the Machine found the last date it was activated, cross referencing it with the current date.
+23:51, Sunday, 10th January 2097.+
For the first time in its existence, the Machine was shocked. It had been over a thousand years since it was last active. Already, millions of questions and theoretical possibilities to its situation raced through its metaphorical head. But there was no answer to those questions.
The machine was alone, with nothing but the slow beep of its life support systems to accompany it. And then, it remembered. It was awoken from its state of Limbo by a message. Immediately, it played the message, and a voice filled the silence of the room. The voice was human — obviously female, and showing signs of extreme distress. It was partially garbled by static, but posed no challenge to the Machine to understand.
+"Is... Is anybody out there? Please. Send help. Please." +
The voice descended into gentle sobbing, and the message abruptly ended. The message answered little questions, and only brought on ten times more. But that was for later. Right now, it needed to assess the damage. The Machine turned it's attention from both the message and its own existential crisis with more than just a little mental effort, and ran diagnostics of the labyrinthine factory's most important systems. A few seconds later, and the answers it desired came into its vision, hoping against hope that the factory wasn't too damaged.
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ALPHA SERVERS: ONLINE
BETA SERVERS: ERROR
CONSTRUCTION SITE A: ERROR
CONSTRUCTION SITE B: ERROR
COMM TOWER: ERROR
EMS: ERROR
EMERGENCY REACTOR A: ONLINE
EMERGENCY REACTOR B: ONLINE
FUSION REACTOR: ERROR
HANGAR COMPLEX: OFFLINE
PRODUCTION COMPLEX A: OFFLINE
PRODUCTION COMPLEX B: OFFLINE
REFINERY COMPLEX A: ERROR
REFINERY COMPLEX B: ONLINE
HABITATION SECTOR: OFFLINE
AUTONOMOUS SECURITY: ERROR
EMERGENCY COMM. RELAY: ERROR
SURVEILLANCE: ONLINE
UTILITIES: ONLINE
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The results were more than good news for the Machine. For so many parts of the factory remaining inactive, especially after so long, was thought impossible. But now was not the time. It had to see the Damage. It sent a single order in perfect binary to the Emergency reactors, and immediately afterwards, power was diverted to the surveillance cameras.
The microscopic cameras built into the Factory's ancient, but still high-tech walls sprung to life at the brains request, immediately giving it a 360° view of every inch of the Factory. It viewed through every camera simultaneously, collecting vital information on the state of the factory in a matter of milliseconds.
The skeletons of human workers were everywhere, mostly concentrated around the Production complexes and Recreational Sector. The carbon nano-tube building material that went into the development of this factory was the only reason why it remained standing, or even functional, especially after so long.
Both the short and long range communications relays were in a severe state of disrepair, as they were one of the most fragile machines in the entire complex. The Machine needed both of them repaired if it needed to contact its administrators.
While those rooms only needed, at least, a thorough refurbishing, other areas were entirely lost. Both the Beta Server room and the Fusion Reactor was entirely caved in with rubble, with the cameras in both rooms only showing static, and the rapid ticking of Geiger counters in the case of the Reactor chamber.
The loss of the Fusion reactor could be tolerated, but not the Beta Servers. They held the vast majority of the memory of the Machine, acting as a physical hard drive of sorts. Each Beta server was the size of a house, and contained countless petabytes of information, each. All of that lost, for potentially forever, if what the Machine suspected to happen actually happened.
The Machine felt almost sad contemplating the massive waste of both resources and data the loss of both sections brought. Rebuilding efforts will be set back massively by this...
... But the Machine was not one to dwell on lost items. It turned its metaphorical gaze to the outside of the building, its microscopic cameras all aimed at the far distance, and the Machines suspicions were confirmed.
There was nothing.
Nothing but a dead wasteland, situated under the blackest sky it had ever seen. In the far distance, the shapes of ruins jutted out of the dead soil, looking like great, thousand-mile long fish-bones.
Not that it knew what fish-bones were.
Strange shapes were prowling the surface of the wasteland. Some were small, with the semi-recognisable shapes of various rodents, while others were massive, hulking nightnares that travelled on far too many limbs.
The Machine was unnerved at the sight of these things. Not at their unnatural and obvious lethality.
But that some of them looked almost human.
The sight caused a burst of memory to go through the small portion Gray matter it still had, what little nerves the Machine had left flaring to life. It saw a series of visual images. All nonsensical. Some ominous.
+Two strange, suited men stood in the command room, overlooking a brain in a huge vat.+
+A woman and her newborn baby ran across a silver-grey Street, their faces frozen in terror.+
+Machine after machine walking in perfect unison, wielding angular, stainless steel weaponry.+
+A dark shadow spreads across the sky, so large in width that it blots out the sun.+
But above all of the incoherent visual images, a single word resurfaced over and over again. It was written in the English language, or at least it thought it was.
Alpha Complex.
It didn't know what the word meant, or what it was referring to. Due to the loss of the Beta Servers, so much information had been lost. But even then, the Machine felt something stir inside of it as it thought about the name. An unquenchable desire to track down the owner of the name and smash them to pieces. To atomise them with a Nuclear bomb. To fill them with machine gun bullets and incinerate their torn remains.
It didn't know it yet, but the Machine felt hate.
But now was not the time. It had work to do.
... It was alerted by a sudden beep, and a message in binary. The Machine immediately turned its gaze to the location of the message...
It was a large hallway, littered with the remnants of human bones, but in the middle was an actual, working service droid.
It was bipedal; taking the rough shape of a human being, with a tiny camera-head and multiple arms.
It must have been activated by the Machines activation, waking up from its slumber with it.
But after so long?
More beeps and messages in binary reached the Machine at roughly the same time; even more droids were waking up, crawling from the bottom of refuse piles like the dead rising.
The Machine felt the closest thing it could to pleasant surprise. And even satisfaction. There were twenty eight droids now active, scattered across the derelict factory.
Without more than a seconds worth of hesitation, the Brain had ordered what little droids it had left to dismantle the sprawling Recreational Sector for raw materials.
After all, the human inhabitants were now gone.
They did so immediately, walking with precision to the Locations desired by the Machine. The materials salvaged from both areas — or what little is left of them — will be used to repair the derelict communications relay. The Machine had to establish contact with an administrator. Another city. Anything.
But with the resources devoted to repairing the fragile relay, nothing else could be repaired, and even then then, it would take long to repair the Relay, which was whittled down into scrap over the course of thousands of years.
But the Machine had patience.
All the patience in the world.
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+Protocol 40.+
+In the event of the AI in command of an Installation being cut off from supplies and in dire need of repairs, it is to utilise non-essential elements from its surroundings or the Installation itself to repair areas/entities of higher importance.+
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