A Robotic Overmind for a Dungeon

Well crap. I look around the decrepit and dusty room that I now find myself in which was illuminated by a few, very dim, lights. The room was quite large and had an assortment of various metallic furniture scattered around the room which were completely covered in layers of dust that looked to have been accumulating for who knows how long. On one of the walls was a set of doors which seemed to once have had a nice shade of blue but currently it looked to have lost much of its vibrancy over the years.

I begin to look downwards before I begin to realize what was wrong. Around where my legs should be was nought but dust and the hard concrete ground. I raise my hands up to my face to rub my eyes, only to find that my hands were gone as well. A few minutes of hyperventilating about the prospect of no longer having my body, I calmed myself down enough to take charge of my mind and to assess my situation.

Experimentally, I try to grab onto a nearby desk but my hands slip right through. I also try to walk forward like normal and that leads to me gliding around the room with little to no control. Before hitting the wall I begin to flail my arms, trying to slow my approach, I actually slow down and eventually stop before hitting the wall. I begin moving my arms in a swimming motion which does seem to move me a bit but after more experimentation I eventually figured out that I could just think to move towards where I wished to which was a bit hard to control but I soon got the hang of it.

Looking around the room with my newfound mode of transport, I saw a few odd things like two surprisingly functional looking machines in the corner of the room and a few boxes strewn about the room, one of which was glowing with a faint blue hue. Focusing on the glowing metal container first, a screen located on one of the sides of the box lights up as I get close.

On the screen, it displayed a loading bar and some text saying that it had "detected a new AI administrator present" and that it had begun "granting access to a new administrator". I was slightly confused for a few moments, I was an underpaid factory worker not an administrator, much less an AI one.

Before I could contemplate the sudden change of career and my now AI status, the metallic box opened up with a hiss. I looked inside of the box to see some kind of construction manual nestled at the bottom of the container. On the front cover of the manual was an image of some kind of arachnid based robot. Then a small block of text appeared in front of me displaying that I now possessed the blueprint for a "General Maintenance Drone Crawler Variant".

A drone huh, only a blueprint but still could be useful. Although I have no idea how I'm going to pick up the manual seeing that I no longer have any of my limbs, let alone construct the whole bot. I barely understood how to operate my section of the production line, Corporate never really cared enough to train us on how to make the entire product. They only cared that we could complete our section of the circuit and then pass it over to the next sap in line.

Then the machine sitting in the corner suddenly lights up and I can hear the faint sounds of the internal mechanisms whirling back to life as if waking from a deep slumber. Drifting over to the machine, I see that it too has a screen and, upon detecting my presence, has the same lines of text stating that I now have been granted full access to the machine. Then the screen changes to display a menu like list of all my drone blueprints, stated near the top of the menu.

The top of the screen displayed that this machine was a 'small drone works' and on its right was a little question mark box. Clicking onto the little box with one of my invisible hands, an information tab appeared in front of the main screen. The information tab read that the small drone work was a smaller version of the standard medium drone work meant to create small-basic drones.

The tab also explained that it ran off of internal batteries and a small energy siphon which was able to pull in energy from the unit's surroundings, something it's larger brethren could not sustain themselves on, although an external powersource can increase efficiency in production. It stated that it could store a small amount of fabrication materials within itself and act as an emergency relay node for nearby drones if disconnected from their administrator AI and a larger drone works is unavailable.

Closing the information tab, I look to the main screen and see some indicators on the very right side showing that the small drone works currently had half of its storage capacity met. I also noticed on the left side of the screen was a section labeled as the drone production queue.

Looking over to the right of my one and only blueprints designation was two buttons and a two digit counter. The first button was placed right after my drone blueprints designation and was another information display and I made a note to myself to look at that after the next two things.

The number counter was placed second to last and near the end of the drone blueprints tab which had an arrow which pointed up and others which pointed down and were located above and below it so I assumed that it was a counter for how many drones I wished to produce. The second button was on the very edge of the blueprints tab and had the word 'construct' labeled on top of it which was quite self explanatory.

Looking back to the information button, I once again click upon it, and the blueprints tab slides down to reveal a description of the drone. According to the description, the 'general maintenance drone crawler variant' or just the 'GMD C' was a crawler variation of the 'GMD' which encompassed multiple distinct drones. The 'GMD C' is primarily used for construction as they are able to climb on shear walls and scaffolding and they can double as field repair units. With their sharp mandibles they are able to cut off excess materials from scaffolding and other such thin metals.

Huh, so I got a builder drone. Certainly could be helpful, although I doubt I'll be having them do any construction any time soon, given that I don't exactly have any materials to do so. I clicked the arrow above the drone production counter a few times but upon reaching the number three the center refused to go any further, citing the fact that I only had enough materials stored in the drone work's storage module.

I selected the 'construct' button and an image of the drone, with the number three in the bottom right corner, appeared in the queue on the left of the screen. As time slowly passed, a bar underneath the drone's image slowly began to fill up and above the bar was a timer a couple minutes short of a dozen.

Floating away from the screen, I move over to the other machine nearby and it does the same as the drone works and begins to authorize my access to itself. As it did its thing, I examined the exterior of the machine which was for the most part just a large metal box with a funnel at the top of the machine and an exit shut at its bottom.

Once its screen was done booting up, the screen displayed that it was a basic refinery/fabricator and it also had an information button which I promptly interacted with.

The information tab explained that the basic refinery was a simpler version of the standard refinery. The basic refinery is able to take processed or unprocessed resources and is able to strip down or refine into usable base components. Closing out of the information tab, I turn to see that one of the drones had finished fabricating.

The drone, as if noticing my presence, springs awake and scuttles over to me before stopping at where my feet would have been. The drone had six legs and a flat boxy exterior with small mandibles which protruded from, what I guessed was, the frontal half of its chassis. On the back side of the drone was a small welder pointed downwards to the floor and on all of its joints were small bulbs which gave off a faint blue light.

Not really knowing what to do, I point over to the spider drone and then to the refinery which it seems to perceive as an order to operate the machine and so they begin to grab various small metal scraps and drop it into the refinery's funnel. As the scrap metal slides into the refinery, the machine whirls to life and begins to emit a faint glow.

I continue to watch the spider drone work until the next drone finishes fabrication and so I send them to open up the door opposite of the refinery and drone works. The spider drone dutifully crawls over to the door and looks up and seems to realize it is not tall enough to reach it. So the drone uses its little legs and plants them onto the door and begins to scale it.

Once it reaches the door handle it grabs onto it and slowly shifts it open by swinging a little bit. I give a pat on the head to the spider who opened the door as thanks and the drone in question seems to stand a little bit higher.

With the door open I could now see into the next room which was much larger than the one I came from. The room looked to be a slandered looking factory floor with rows of conveyor belts which looked not functional and grated walkways high above where the workers would have slaved away.

On the ground floor were more chairs strewn about and other such scrap metal laying around on the floor. After looking around a bit more, I found the corpse of another drone of some kind which had its insides spilled out of it. I tell my spider drone which helped open the door to go and help his slightly older brother in smelting down some of this scrap metal and so it scampers off.

I continued to watch as my drones slowly dragged the hunks of metal into the refinery which spat out metal bars every so often. Every time that happened I would order one of my spiders to drag the bar over and place it into the small drone works which would allow me to queue up another spider. This continued on until eventually I had amassed a total of eight spiders which all moved about the building. I was beginning to nod off into sleep when I suddenly started hearing hurried footsteps outside of the larger rooms' double doors. I floated over just in time to see a strange form slide one of the two doors open.