Chapter 138: The Forge

Chapter 138: The Forge

It had taken almost a month and a half to get the Forge fully online. It was still an amazing, and expected, time frame. Even a somewhat useful one, truth be told. Mostly since it meant, by the end of their work, some basic gravity plating had been worked out by researchers on Orbit 1. The vast majority of the manufacturing space of Forge 1 would remain Zero-G, of course, it being a boon to many of the processes they wanted the Forge to handle. But the parts of the 1.2 kilometer-long space station that would see regular traffic by people now had crude gravity plating capable of producing roughly .57 gravities. Still nowhere close to a the standard 1g of Earth, but far better than trying to work in Zero-G, or even the .16 gravity the moon had. It was projected as enough to allow longer-term occupation of the stations, so long as the crew did some basic exercises, and the people still working on the grav plating project would undoubtedly get a better model working in time.

Strictly speaking, it had actually only taken them three weeks to get the majority of Forge 1 built. The other three weeks of their time since had been spent working with multiple teams, troubleshooting how to make manufacturing work in space. Some things were obvious, even easier to do in Zero-G than on Earth. But there were a whole host of tools and processes that had just flat-out never been intended to work without gravity keeping everything together. Anything with fluid needed to be pressurized, for example, just to keep the fluid flowing, since gravity wasn’t there to do the job for you. Likewise, a conveyor belt couldn’t count on gravity keeping its cargo where it was supposed to be, Zero-G molds always needed to be fully 3D and sealed lest what you were pouring into them wandered off, and so on.

They had, of course, put as much thought into such things as they realistically could, down on the ground. There had, in fact, between several entire teams whose job it had been to try and predict all the problems that their highly-modular production lines would face once they got Forge 1 up and running. Those teams, however, hadn’t had nearly long enough to find every issue, which meant they’d expected from the start to need to do a great deal of troubleshooting as they started installing things and testing their designs.

They’d been right, of course, but they’d also had the people in place already ready to tackle the problems as they were found. Some of who had already been experimenting aboard Orbit 2 with simple version of the mechanisms and refining what they had. With Momo to provide custom parts for the solutions to each problems, they’d eventually gotten all of Forge 1’s production bays up and running, already starting to turn out test runs of things like RADS arrays and munitions that there was no end of need for.

That part of things was no longer in their hands, though. Other people would be prioritizing what to make and figuring out how to do so most efficiently. An ever-shifting target that would radically alter as they brought more and more capacity online. Thankfully, there were experts for that, as Momo, Izumi and 2B had other projects in mind. Important ones that were the reason one entire, sizable, deck of Forge 1 was theirs. Given that they had funded and built the station, no one had been able to argue with them about getting it, particularly when they’d rightfully pointed out that the reason they wanted it was for advanced R&D that would help against the Empire.

There was only so much time budgeted before they would need to get working on Refinery 1, of course, but they were intent on making the most of it.

“Okay, run it again 2B! Hopefully that loose connection was the issue!”

Izumi had pulled away from the incredibly complex set of servers, having engaged in the age-old solution of Emergency Percussive Maintenance to not-so-gently encourage two components to properly align. This really should have been the job for an entire team, and she had only 2B and Momo to help. The entire thing wasn’t quite jury-rigged, the precision needed for the complex servers just too tight for anything like that. But it was thousands of components put together by too few people in too little time. The attached single-unit assembler had worked once, already. Something evidenced by the fact that 2B was currently inhabiting a barely-altered version of her original body.

As in, fully up to spec and only modded to the tiny degree needed so that 2B could link with it remotely instead of embodying herself into a Black Box. For better or worse, 2B was a Quirk now, not her original android self. Which meant that one of the things they’d needed to do was invent a Quantum Entanglement Comm using Momo’s own utterly bullshit Quirk to create material that was already Quantum Entangled in specific ways. Something that had taken them years of work to produce even a single working set of units. 2B’s body was very non-disposable as a result. While 2B herself would survive, if the QEC wasn’t recoverable, it would take them additional years to make another for her to inhabit the body remotely with zero latency again.

Then, of course, there was the body itself.

Their previous best efforts had been able to produce an android body for 2B roughly on par with what the Resistance or main line Army of Humanity units used in her old world. Far better than a baseline human, but a significant qualitative drop from even the most basic of YoRHa Units. Even that level had only been possible with Momo providing some of the parts, since the tools to make the tools to make the tools just didn’t exist on this Earth. Their personal workshop had the most advanced tools they’d managed to produce so far, but those were still five or six generations short of being able to make even the cruder Pre-YoRHa android models.

Being in orbit changed that.

A lot.

YoRHa had possessed far more orbital infrastructure than just the Bunker. The original reverse engineering to make YoRHa Black Boxes, for example, had taken place Pre-YoRHa on Kaguya Station, the Army of Humanity’s sixth orbital base and research facility. Of course, humanity was long extinct by then, so it was previous android generations that had been doing the reverse engineering, and that particular orbital base had been destroyed in the attempt. An entire new orbital base, called simply the ‘Lab,’ had been created five years later and eventually succeeded in completing the Black Boxes that would enable YoRHa to operate as it did. A combination of micro-fusion powerplant, made stable with Maso tech, and an uplink that prevented the android intelligence from truly dying, it was the Black Box that had made YoRHa-type androids actually possible.

They could also only be made in space.

The same was actually true of the unique metals that made up a YoRHa combat frame. Though, thankfully, the process of making those metals was actually far easier once you had space in, well, space, to do so. Meaning that, once they had a lab which could freely access a Zero-G environment and be placed in vacuum at will, they were suddenly able to make 2B’s original combat body for the first time. They had, of course, promptly and secretly done so. Then, they’d run off a second set of parts, for a body that was currently resting in the assembler.

“Connection is reporting green, Izumi. Are…are we sure we want to do this? We don’t know how she’ll react. Not with the changes that we’ve made and little knowledge of what happened after my death.”

It wasn’t Izumi that responded, but Momo, who was standing beside 2B’s body. She reached over to squeeze the android’s shoulder, knowing that 2B was conflicted about what they were about to do.

“We’ve trodden the philosophical and practical grounds over and over, 2B. You know the conclusion we all reached together. There’s no going back at this point. It’s both the practical and the right thing to do.”

2B nodded and, with manifest reluctance, began physically entering a number of command codes. This system was air-gapped and shielded in such a way that not even she and Izumi’s cyberpathy could interface with it. For damn good reasons. There were other cyberpaths out there, after all, and anyone other than them getting access to this system could create a catastrophe on par with the Invasion already happening. After all, they were about to do something that Izumi and 2B had debated the ethics of since Izumi was a child. With it being Izumi, as a child, who had questioned the ethics of what they’d realized they might, someday, be capable of.

Whatever entity had saved 2B from the Void and plugged her into Izumi as a Quirk, had turned 2B into an Ark. It had taken them half a decade to even realize it and, to be honest, they weren’t even sure that the entity had meant to do it. The data had been buried deep in the giant repository of everything YoRHa had known, prior to 2B’s death.

Including the final uncorrupted backups of other YoRHa androids.

The data’s inclusion seeming almost incidental in the large picture, yet that little detail had caused thousands of hours of debate between Izumi, 2B, and eventually Momo. They were the only three people who knew about it. Izumi and 2B hadn’t even told Inko, so unsure had they been about what to do with the complex topic and not wanting to burden her with something so…ethically complex. Part of them, of course, had wanted from the start to let those people exist again. Yet, there were issues with that, as all the data belonged to YoRHa androids.

Unlike more normal androids, the ethics that had gone into the creation of YoRHa was sketchy as a lizard with tits. The ‘emotions are prohibited’ thing that Inko and their psychiatrist had needed years to unravel and deal with regarding 2B was, just as one example, YoRHa specific. The people behind the ethically dubious YoRHa project had specifically done so do prevent the now-quasi-immortal androids from acting like the ‘venerable’ humanity all androids were meant to serve. Essentially, they had come so close to reproducing human everything, that they were legitimately afraid that the YoRHa androids would cross some invisible line and start acting fully human. Something that was outright heretical to the androids who designed them in the first place. The need to serve mankind was hardwired in all previous android models. With the YoRHa units, they were afraid that they would be able to overcome that need. Something doubly dangerous since they were intended to eventually be sacrificed from the start.

That fear of them becoming a bit too human wasn’t even misplaced. Not based on the number of times that 2E, 2B’s real model number even if she didn’t choose to identify herself as such, could attest from painful experience. She’d had to execute her partner 9S, 47 times in just a three-year span. Each time because he’d gone ‘off the reservation’ and started self-actualizing in an erratic, destructive way that was very, very human. He’d discover that humanity was extinct, self-actualize into trying to do something about the lie by destroying YoRHa, and then need to be executed.

Those executions were, themselves, unethical as hell. It had taken years for 2B to understand that she hadn’t been the one at fault. She’d literally been created and programmed with the purpose of doing that job, with far less freedom to defy those orders than a Scanner Unit like 9S, with his type having far looser restrictions in order to do their job. It had taken even longer for 2B to come to terms with the fact that her feelings for 9S were inextricably linked to her guilt. Perhaps, had she not been his handler, it could have someday been something healthy. As it was, there was far too much emotional baggage to ever have anything like a stable relationship with the other android.

Nor was the potentially unstable nature of the YoRHa Units limited to that order about emotions. All combat models had been designed to take pleasure in combat. All androids, period, had been designed to take orders from humans, any humans, period. Recreating any of them using the backups that had come with 2B’s data dump of YoRHa’s total, combined knowledge was…problematic, at best. Very problematic. Nor, unfortunately, had YoRHa itself known how to create new android intelligences. That ability had rested elsewhere, on purpose, in case the YoRHa project went fully rogue.

The conclusion they’d come to, in the end, had been that the only way they could realistically bring any of the other YoRHa androids back was to alter their programming. To go in and manually strip out the forced service to humanity, to remove all of the emotional limiters and AI shackles…then hope for the best. Even then, doing that was sufficiently morally dubious that they’d originally decided not to open that particular can of worms.

You know, before an Alien Invasion had forced them to reconsider everything and debate the morality of the issue again.

This time, the result of that debate had come down in a different direction. Tentatively, at least. Strictly speaking, removing the limiters and giving the YoRHa operatives a new lease on life, one where they could make their own choices on whether to help or not? That much was fine, morally and ethically speaking. The problem, of course, was that YoRHa Units weren’t always all the most stable of individuals, and it was possible they’d end up producing near All-Might level Villains instead of allies of humanity. They could even end up with a Rogue AI of the ‘protect humanity by imprisoning them so they don’t run with scissors’ variety. An unfortunate possibility which had, combined with the fact they were very arguably creating life, been enough to stay their hand without a very good reason. The problem, of course, being that they now had a very good reason.

Which meant they needed to be careful who they choose and do them just a few at a time. Which is exactly what they were doing right now, in a nice, isolated lab well away from Earth. With, moreover, three people present who could suppress even any combat model they transferred over as a test case, if they went crazy. All three of them tensed, watching the servers as 2B finished the long sequence of command codes and Izumi physically plugged in with a wrist-mounted cord that led to her own Quirk-created augmentations. This time, instead of crashing mid-startup, the data transfer from the repository in Izumi’s Quirk began properly. The massive rack of high-capacity, custom servers needed to house an AI Hub of android backups lighting up like a blue-and-white Christmas tree.

“Core Hub is…stable. Backups coming online…now also stable. Tertiary standbys reporting powered. Data uplink in progress.”

A long few minutes went by as two progress bars appeared, the first showing the transfer from Izumi’s Quirk to the Hub, which would house the new backups. The Hub they’d constructed could handle a solid four dozen YoRHa-units. Which, frankly, they’d be doing good to find that many who were stable enough to ‘wake up’ out of the database.

2B thought most of the Operators would be fine, and they would be invaluable in helping take the growing strain of 2Bs attempts to connect various worldwide logistics networks. Not to mention in providing overwatch for any YoRHa field combat teams, as well as for elite groups of Heroes who still lacked very many trained individuals capable of that sort of person-in-the-chair support. Of the combat units, 2B was far less certain. Though it was one of them that they would be waking first. A specific unit that 2B had found a great deal of classified information on in the repository. If there were any of the combat androids that could adapt it would be her. After all, as a prototype model, she’d never actually been subject to the emotional suppression rules in the first place…

It was the second progress bar that they were really watching, of course. It was showing transfer of the initial copy over to the android body. Inside the Hub, the backups weren’t really ‘awake.’ It was just data at that point. At least with YoRHa units, it was only once their current backup was synched into an appropriate body that they ‘woke up.’ Why there had even been a backup of this particular android was a puzzle even 2B had no answer for, as she’d been disconnected from the YoRHa network for years. Though, considering the database she’d been provided including other information that would have only been known to specific mostly-disconnected androids? The odds were that the entity in the Void had simply done something like copy ‘All YoRHa knowledge,’ instead of copying a specific database.

Two progress bars finished one after another.

The android body in the assembly cradle twitched to life.

A2 opened her eyes and took one look at Momo before speaking.

“Damnit, 2B. Couldn’t you find humans that weren’t being invaded by aliens? At least there’s no machines this time. There aren’t any machines, right? I’m really done with fighting those. Oh, and if you wake Commander White up, you better let me stab that bitch.”

Nonplused at the string of statements, eventually 2B managed a reply.

“We are not intending to awaken anyone from Command. They are too complicit in the things that were wrong with YoRHa.”

A2 nodded.

“Good. Now, when do I start killing stuff? At least this time, there are really humans to protect…”

Momo and Izumi looked at each other. This had gone…well? Probably? They both supposed they’d find out in time. Though it was going to be very awkward to answer questions about where the hyper-advanced combat Androids had come from. Hopefully, it would take a little while for anyone to notice. Better to ask forgiveness than permission. Right?

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AN 1: Ah, and here we have where I made a liar out of myself. Originally, back when I first started, I made it absolutely clear that I did not intend to bring any additional characters from Nier over to MHA. Something that was, at the time, 110% true. But the original path this story was supposed to follow was Canon Divergence->Invasion->Guild->Guild Counter Invasion->Victory->Story Epilogue. My original outline was invalidated when I put the story's focus up to a vote on and my patrons all surprised me by wanting me to focus more on the engineering and industrial buildup. That caused a massive rewrite to the outline and, eventually, I realized I was going to either need a LOT of OCs, or else to source some support characters from one series or the other. None of the characters will become primary focuses for the story though, only supporting cast, with me having ultimately come to the conclusion that using them was better than a flood of OCs. MHA itself just doesn't have that big of a known number of background characters to pull from, unfortunately.