Chapter 22: Robots are what I'm About
Solar Powered is fucking OP. I know I should talk about how the Mayor called in the army to reestablish order in the city, but fuck it feels like I'm supercharged all the time now. In a running theme with the late game perks, Solar Powered provides many benefits towards both the body and the cyberware, and it is damn easy to hack.
When exposed to solar radiation I get a +2 to Strength, Major Healing Factor, and I feel energized. The Major Healing Factor is no joke, my meat can come back from the brink of death very quickly, but I don't have much meat. Would be a very sad thing if not for it trickling down in an almost DC Comics Promethium style healing metal nonsense. It's not nearly as powerful as it is for the meat bits of me, but I'll never need to perform basic maintenance again and my Heavy Real Skin healing like actual real skin is fucking awesome.
And it only needed the presence of solar radiation to trigger, not the actual sun, and did not scale with intensity, so I created an implant that gives off the full range of light that makes up solar radiation and wango bango I'm on top of the world.
Or at least it feels that way.
One might think that the Mayor calling in army, enforcing a curfew, and trying to get the Valentinos declared a terrorist organization would stress me out. It did not.
I gutted 6th Street to achieve a greater order in the city while my gang undergoes our big leap into the greater world of arms dealing. Gangland shit happening is good for me and the street cred, but I am willing to slow down on my climb to level 50 in return for billions of eddies. I know it's a big sacrifice, but it is one I am willing to make.
Unfortunately gains in the business world do not translate to Street Cred. The insider trading I've done was some big criminal shit, and quite lucrative to the Street Cred, but the actual mechanics of the business, making and moving product, did not.
The army being around definitely cramped the street warrior life, but everyday business was only moderately inconvenienced in return for a big helping hand of stability. As for the curfew, am I supposed to be pissed that I can sleep more soundly knowing that anyone roaming the streets at night is likely to get shot. What is this Mayor thinking? I manage two major massacres in as many months and he gives me more mandated by law time at home where I can do cool shit like play video games, learn new stuff from the web, and bang hot girls.
I should send him a gift basket.
As for the campaign to get the Valentinos labeled as a terrorism organization in the State of Northern California, between the confusion about people thinking I'm Adam Smasher and a few messages to my good friends in Sacramento, it cleared right up and the army was not authorized to use lethal force on the gang without reasonable cause.
So Night City finally knew peace while hosting ten thousand infantrymen of the Northern California Army.
Welles Arms was operated by members of the gang and employees verified by the many business associates we kept. Training on how to operate the equipment and maintain quality assurance was a synch using chip technology. With just a few days of work I could produce a set of data shards capable of teaching thousands of employees how to do everything Welles Arms required of them.
Obviously those people needed to meet the shard halfway and actually pay attention to the program, but most of the process of making the Smartweapons and Links is automated. As long as a task was low variability and fully completable by following a defined rule based workflow I could automate without the need to rely on any level of Artificial Intelligence. They simply cannot be trusted in the manufacturing of weapons, hell they can't even be trusted to run a cab company.
My AutoDoc is pushing it, but his AI is well shackled and his personality matrix well defined. Despite his snark he is only capable of performing overtly agreed upon operations and updating his medical data banks. I still regularly check to make sure he hasn't managed anything sketchy.
Of course I'd have the same problem if I enslaved a doctor and told him to do surgeries on me. Plus the service would be shittier.
Plus I needed human employees to promote the general welfare of the community, but I quickly learned that no amount of training would magically make people capable of good judgment and decisiveness, and my days were consumed in operating the factory. Fortunately after a month we'd worked out the kinks and I'd managed to whip up some more efficient equipment for the task at hand.
The Army left Night City in December with the first shipment of weapons and ammo from the factory. We'd hit another in December, and January, and February the final shipment to complete the order. By then I expected even more orders coming down the pipe, specifically ammunition. It would also be the time to introduce the world to the glories of my Scorpitrons.
I'd already designed them with a similar pilot scheme as the Basilisk panzer tank, two pilots neurally connected to the unit, controlling it with their minds. In truth the Scorpitrons are robots, and I'll be using the data collected from the pilots to better program their combat routines. I'd allow the beauty of human ingenuity in the fiery crucible of war to help me discover the best techniques and tactics for my supreme style weapons.
Once Arasaka starts pumping money into NorCal to resist Militech I'll have the richest corporation in the world funding my war asset build up. Big Brain planning at its finest.
While I waited for that happy day I became quite enamored with building more and more of the technology available to me through the Big MT, which included most of RobCo's catalog as the robotics expert of the Think Tank, Doctor 0, was obsessed with dismantling RobCo tech to try and build better variants of it. He had success in the hardware department, but his software skills left much to be desired.
The late model Sentry Bots can run circles around Militech and Arasaka's clumsy Minotaur bots and with the upgrades 0 figured out and the right load out annihilate entire squads of them. In fact, I have an entire catalog of robots that either equate or outperform most offerings from robotics giants like Zhirafa Technical Manufacturing, and I can take the best of both worlds approach for some of the 'leaner' designs. Afterall, there's nothing stopping me from swapping a Mr. Handy's rocket propulsion with hover tech so he doesn't heat up and burn any room he enters. Or give him actual hands.
I absolutely built Codsworth for Christmas and gave him actual hands rather than those horror movie implements he runs around with normally. Hands that are also multitools making him even more handy. He speaks perfect posh British and makes me tacos.
I rank Codsworth higher in value than the two real treasures of the Big MT just for the time he saves me everyday cooking. The guy is God sent. Or in this case Devil sent.
The real treasures of the Big MT were fission power cells and the Sierra Madre Nano Forges. Cyberpunk batteries are no joking matter, very advanced and capable, but in terms of pure output and lifespan they have nothing on Fallout Tech (ignoring Fallout 4 gameplay where a battery that should supply a Power Armor for years burns out in minutes, sad face).
Nanotechnology is a real bitch as it is a multidisciplinary scientific research area comprising chemistry, physics, biology, medicine, neurology, information technology, and engineering. A guy needs to wear a lot of hats to be an actual expert in the field, or have Science as a skill. Such a lovely catch all that one. There are a lot of major technical issues with the field such as temperature control, contamination, energy transfer, and communication. The Big MT got around these challenges by ignoring them. How? By actually making Micro Forges. Micromachines are actually what you think off when a Grey Goo scenario is happening. Nanomachines, son, are actually very specific technology. They do one thing, and that is it. How complex do you think you can get the programing on something that is only a few atoms wide?
But, by building a versatile micromachine and housing it within a forge the size of a vending machine, the Big MT handled all the engineering issues of nanotechnology, as the micromachines fabricate, power, and communicate with the nanomachines while the forge handles temperature control and contamination thus creating the legendary matter recombobulation.
Gotta give the Think Tank points for their fantastic naming convention.
It'll be a lot of work and eddies trying to scale the technology up to commercial viability, but once I get my hands on some actual plants and animals I can get some actual god damn food that isn't Kibble or SCOP for a price just slightly less than eating that way for an entire year.
Joy of joys.
But fucking robots man. That's what I'm about.
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