Chapter 926: The Rise of the Drones

After a few hours of warp-speed travel, the Petrachelys was finally about to jump out of hyperspace into an all-new galaxy. Along with a sudden light that illuminated the space, the warped space opened, and the silver-white spaceship slowly emerged from the portal.

“Arriving L-B-35 outpost, the autopilot disengaged.”

Nolan’s voice awakened Hao Ren from his immersion in the star chart. He looked up; the simulation projection around the flight deck gradually appeared as the external cameras streamed the scenery outside the spacecraft into the flight deck in a panoramic perspective.

He found that they had arrived in a strange space surrounded by dust clouds. The space background here appeared lavender in color. Perhaps there were thin, primitive gases that had not condensed enough and formed into a galaxy. In the distant horizon, there was a series of gray strips with sharp outlines, which was where stars were born. Directly ahead of the Petrachelys was the landing pad that the drones had built.

A vast but weird metal fortress was floating in space. Like a persimmon with a few protrusions, it was a nearly circular structure with a radius of several kilometers and a concave center. The massive fortress was gray and dark in color intermittently and built of metal and rock like a weird civilization heritage. The edge of the fort was full of flashing lights and pipe-like structure protruding out of the densest lights. Drones came in and out of those pipes busily like a swarm of worker bees.

In the concave part of the fort, there were several huge antenna-like structures placed within the protection of turrets and guarded and patrolled by combat drones. Although this was just civilian-level firepower, they looked intimidating.

It was a nest built by the drone cluster, not aesthetically pleasing in the human eye but looked like a giant anthill piled up with metal and stones. The drones made this on the principle of convenience and ease of use and apparently could not care less about aesthetics. The fort was one of the more massive nests of the drones. Usually, it took a long time for a group of outpost drones to build a base of this size, but the LB-35 series drones were lucky enough to find a piece of asteroids that were of the appropriate size and hardness and hollowed out the celestial rock and built their proliferation plants and facilities.

The Petrachelys slowly approached the large landing pad on the weird fort. Nolan’s voice continued to sound in the flight deck. “Autopilot guides the spacecraft to the drone’s nest. Welcoming and guidance signals have been identified. The inbound procedure initiated, and the main propulsion system has been shut down, and the auxiliary propulsion system is running. By the way, why do I have to report these stupid things every time?” Nolan asked.

“Don’t insert anything else while reporting the status of the spacecraft,” Hao Ren chided as he shot a glance at Nolan whose image was on the navigation map. “Could you follow the prescribed instructions, couldn’t you?”

Nolan pouted and waved her hand, using her first perspective vision looking at the strange fort that looked like an anthill and the drones, including the original LB-35 fleet and the drones that had just arrived from the nearby support nodes, which flew around her like a swarm of bugs guarding the nest. Nolan’s tone of voice sounded a little weird when she said, “This place feels scary, especially the nest in front of me, it looks like a bug nest.”

Lily also had a little complaint. “I’ve never expected that the spaceport of the drones was so creepy,” she said.

Hao Ren had the same feeling too, his eyes affixed on the weird drone nest—it was also his first time seeing this.

Though he was the one sending out the drones and giving the drones instructions to expand and explore, he had only met the drone fleet out in the open universe, or communicated directly with the consciousness of the drone cluster through the radio. He had never personally seen how the drone breeding ground looked.

It was the first time he came to see the first nest node. The look of the nest was not what he had imagined.

He had thought that it would look like a coffin, after all, the products of Xi Li Celestial technology all looked like a coffin.

The Petrachelys slowly touched down on the landing pad under the guidance of the autopilot signal. A group of mechanical arms held the spacecraft firmly in place. Then Hao Ren and his entourage disembarked and went into the nest through a conduit.

To play host to the ‘drone-cluster commander,’ the nest had self-adjusted itself after receiving the instructions. It had built a temporary inner atmosphere and a constant temperature system so that Hao Ren and his men would feel comfortable when they walked in. Two small round drones came out of the nest to greet their master. The two drones were Wanderer-type drones. This small type of drone did not go out into outer space stayed in and around the nest or outpost, was responsible for internal inspections and maintenance, just like the autonomous bots of the Petrachelys.

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The Wanderers guided Hao Ren through a corridor. It was only a casual visit, and he did not expect he would see such exciting things here. The interior of the nest was as strange as its exterior. It entirely was not a place where humans would call it beautiful. The drones had only built the wide tubular passage and reinforcement brackets by joining metals and raw asteroid rocks together. It looked like the intestine of some steel monster.

The interior was bright with drones shuttling busily through the holes and ducts.

Looking at the surrounding scenery, Lily mumbled, “I feel like the base of the villain.”

Before Hao Ren could say anything, a flat voice suddenly came from all around them, “It’s just coincidentally similar, madam.”

Lily jumped out of her skin when she suddenly saw a huge, shapeless face floating in the air, projected and formed by beams of blue light. It was a hologram. They had arrived in a larger chamber of the nest without knowing it. Several main passages converged here, forming an oval space. Mechanical equipment was running with a low buzzing noise here, and this equipment screamed of Xi Ling characteristics, but because they were placed in a place that looked like a bug nest, everything seemed to be a bit weird.

Hao Ren said hi to the face. The atmosphere of the nest was weird, he had studied all the relevant information in the inspector’s manual before releasing the drones, and later he had consulted his peers about the drones, so he seemed very calm. He knew that this was going to be like that. “This is the first time I saw your ‘nest,'” Hao Ren said.

“It’s the drones’ honor,” the huge face was animated and smiling, but its voice was still machine-cold. “I didn’t expect Commander to pay a visit in person suddenly, so I had only managed to ad hoc construct an ecological environment. I hope it is comfortable enough.”

“It’s pretty good.” Hao Ren scratched his hair. “I was just thinking to visit casually, never expect I’d have troubled you so much.”

“The drones do not think it is a trouble,” the big blue face said flatly. “It is within my ability, so it is a regular load.”

“Well, let’s not talk about this,” Hao Ren said. He knew that the thinking of the drone cluster was rather rigid, so he wanted to end this topic. “Is there any news about the lens trails?”

“It is less twelve hours after the last discovery of the trails; there has not been a report coming back from the drones. We are expanding the search area, and it will take 24 hours to have any new findings.”

“Well, just as I thought. It’s not easy,” Hao Ren said while scratching his chin. He was not anxious, just that after seeing the drone nest, he suddenly found that there were enough interesting things here to kill time. It seemed that he was not going to be bored to death in this outpost. “I can wait. I can finally have a chance to learn about the work of the drone cluster. By the way, you heard you just mentioned ‘coincidentally similar’; you know what Lily was talking about?” he asked.

Holograms began to appear around the chamber showing a myriad of footages: movies, TV shows, animations, games, and simple video clips of humans and otherworldlings, about the stories of the revolt of various drones and the rampage of the robots. Some of them were fantasies, but some were very disturbing because they looked really like documentaries.

Watching the footage, they were dumbstruck. Other than Lily, everyone appeared calm; they were calm because these guys had never watched sci-fi movies, especially Y’zaks, who did not even know what AI rampage was.

Hao Ren arched the corner of his mouth. “You even collect these things. Don’t you think it’s strange for you to watch these things?” he asked.

“We are connected to the Empire Data Network. Collecting these cultural works is my hobby. They embody the interesting parts of the basic thinking process of native races, while others manifest the ‘forms of civilization,'” the drone-cluster consciousness replied matter-of-factly. “The rebellion of the drone cluster and the continual development of AI ​​have led to a runaway plot that is not only very interesting, has a discussion value, looks like serious documentary literature, but also has a fictionally romantic scent to it. It is a hot topic in our forum.”

Hao Ren was dumbstruck, especially by the last sentence of the drone-cluster consciousness. “Forum? What forum?”

Hao Ren suddenly found that even though he had read a lot of manuals and got a lot of information from his peers, he still knew very little about the drone empire that he had created.

This ever-growing AI was becoming like a living person.