READ NOVEL ONLINE B2 – Lesson 11: “Mind over Body”
“That’s it! You can do it! Just a little more!” Alpha encouraged the ‘small,’ bobcat-sized black ant in the middle of the room.
The ant pushed itself up on shaking legs. Its thin legs wobbled and bent in ways an ant leg shouldn’t, and as it took a step forward, it collapsed back to the ground.
Alpha sighed. “Well, it’s progress, at least,” he said.
He then deactivated the ant’s neuralink. The small black ant melted into a black blob of quivering nanomass. A pair of manipulator arms built into rails in the ceiling, then picked up Alphantonso V and placed them back into their resting chamber.
Two weeks after starting the project, the base was coming along well. A dozen rooms with reinforced, soundproofed walls filled the space behind the royal chambers. Though most were being used for storage right now. The main chamber was currently acting as an assembly plant for various pieces of equipment that would, in time, take up much of the base floor space. Several rooms even stored servers for the AIs that Alpha had whipped up to run the research equipment and monitor the antborgs.
After what happened with the transport drone, Alpha was still hesitant to rely on more complex AIs, but the current simple models had remained stable. Sure, they couldn’t do the more difficult analysis in any short amount of time, but he could leave that kind of thing to his own personal sub-AI.
The medical wing was fully up and running, with over two dozen incubation chambers finished and ready for new eggs. Alpha had even built a basic med pod in case any antborgs became seriously injured.
The antborg project itself was also making headway, though with a few hiccups here and there.
So far, the IV-2 models were still Alpha’s most successful attempts. Based on the original Alphantonso IV, but optimized and tweaked with the lessons he’d learned, Alpha now had roughly a dozen IV-2s roaming the ant colony, doing various ant things.
He’d yet to get his hands on a few samples he’d been wanting, but that was to be expected. The few times he’d directed an antborg to collect a sample, it had been turned away by other ants at one point or another. The colony was huge, but every ant had its job.
Nonetheless, the antborgs had been hard at work. The pheromone dictionary had grown even larger since Alphantonso IV’s untimely demise. So much so that the onboard AI could now reliably deduce where the antborg was going and what they were doing. Most of this was logged for later analysis, with Alpha directly informed if there were any interesting new discoveries or developments.
More importantly, two of the IV-2s had developed into nursery ants. This had caused a few easily corrected issues with their implants, but now Alpha had a reliable and discrete way of collecting new batches of eggs. They were easier to modify when fresh from a queen. He’d even started marking and cataloging which eggs came from which of the five queens. Mostly to see if there was any difference between them. Say if one queen lay a disproportionate number of soldiers. Or if one queen’s progeny were larger on average. This would be a long-term experiment, however.
For now, it was a matter of building numbers. The IV-2s would remain few at the start, but if he could get Alphantonso V working properly, the possibilities were endless. That said, he’d run into a slight problem.
Where the IV-2s were little more than ants with cybernetic implants, the Alphantonso V iteration asked, “What if it was the other way around?”
To that end, Alpha had attempted something never before done on an insect. Something often reserved for only the most severe and life-threatening cases in the Federation.
Full Biological Augmentation.
Said another way, if Alphantonso IV was an ant with cybernetic implants, then Alphantonso V was a drone with an ant’s brain.
Or more specifically, it was a nanite drone grown alongside the central nervous system of an ant using all the biological data Alpha had gathered so far.
TBAs were almost always only offered to soldiers who had been so severely wounded that not even the Federation’s most advanced medical technology had any hope of returning any kind of quality of life.
Their central nervous system was then removed from their biological bodies and grafted into a mechanical one. This came with its issues, of course. The procedure was expensive, often leaving the patients in massive debt. Not only that, but the wide range of biology, body types, and even personal differences meant no one type of artificial body would work. This meant these bodies had to be fine-tuned and regularly calibrated to prevent issues such as neural rejection and ‘cyberpsychosis.’
That had gotten Alpha thinking, however. If these issues were caused by a disconnect between the person and the artificial body, what would happen if you fixed that? By, say, growing their body around their central nervous system from birth so that they never had a ‘real’ body to begin with.
Of course, such a thing had never truly been done before. The ethics were questionable at best, when looking at non-sapient lifeforms, and flat-out illegal regarding sapients. Oh, Alpha was sure someone out there had tried. The allure of semi-immortality had called to biologicals since the first sapient creatures looked up at the stars.
But if any had succeeded, the results had never been published for obvious reasons.
As for insects? The only reason such a thing had yet to be attempted was because cyborg insects were simply cheaper and easier to make.
Even so, Alpha had felt it was a viable direction to go. A drone ant could blend in with the colony perfectly as long as he kept the important biological bits. Not only that, but Alpha could take direct control of the ant rather than make ‘strong suggestions’ as he had to with Alphantonso IV. Alpha wouldn’t even have to worry about losing the ants, either. Even if its biological components were irreparably damaged, the ‘body’ could be controlled and recovered,
No more losing important bits to random goblins.
The issue Alpha was having now was while the ant brain had accepted its artificial body well enough, it didn’t really understand how to use it. Even simplifying the brain’s controls to just muscle movement, there were still differences between a biological body and the nanite body. Differences that the ant’s simple brain was struggling to overcome.
It was making progress, but Alpha would have to improve on the design further. The hope was to ‘train’ the ants to use their body within the first few hours. Roughly the same time it took the natural ants to harden their carapace after pupating. This would make it easier for them to blend in.
The irony that Alpha had come full circle in his antborg design wasn’t lost on him. Alphantonso V was closer to his first iteration than the previous one. Only now, Alpha understood more about the ants and how they operated, both physically and socially.
Now that all the pieces were coming together, things were starting to look up!
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“LOOK UP!” came the warning from somewhere in the middle of the group.
Several pairs of eyes shot to the ceiling of the small cavern just in time to see the large stone crab-like creature drop. It landed on an unlucky woman and pinned her to the ground, its sharp, pointed legs digging into her limbs.
The woman screamed from pain and fear as the rocky crab screeched back, its jaws drooling. Its multisegmented mouth parts opened wide. Only for the creature to be punted across the cavern by a large booted foot. The crab soared over the gathered adventures and slammed into the far wall with a sickening crunch before falling into a shallow water pond. Instantly, the waters churned to life as unseen creatures fought over the remains.
Bosco ground his teeth as he watched the woman be dragged away by several of the adventurers to have her wounds treated.
This hadn’t been the only injury since the group had made it past the Rockcaps, the giant centipedes that had caused their first casualties. And Bosco doubted it would be the last.
The tunnels had branched off down several side passages shortly after the centipedes, and Bosco had sent small groups down each to scout the area. A few hours and one missing team later, Seeker and Bosco had decided it wasn’t worth the risk or time to scout each branch. Instead, Seeker had recommended picking the tunnel with the highest concentration of lumoss.
This would indicate the most traveled and theoretically safest route. Of course, ‘safety’ was subjective, and the group’s confrontations were becoming more dangerous and more frequent the deeper they went.
They’d stopped in the current cavern to rest due to the presence of the water pool. Sure, it was filled with crabs and other nasty things, but nothing the experienced adventurers couldn’t handle. If they didn’t get the drop on you, that was… sometimes literally, as previously seen.
The sudden sound of running footsteps drew the group’s attention and caused several to reach for their weapons. This would not be the first time a scout would come running back while being chased by one horror or another.
The footsteps grew louder until the scout rounded the corner and rushed into the cavern, panting.
Many of the gathered adventurers tensed but relaxed a moment later when nothing appeared behind him. The scout stop in front of Bosco, their hands on their knees as they panted.
Bosco folded his arms and stared down at the scout. “Report,” the large man said.
The scout only held up a finger as they tried to regain their breath, making Bosco frown. Before he could say anything, however, Seeker handed the winded scout a canteen. The scout threw back the canteen and drained it in only a few gulps.
He straightened and stared up at Bosco, grinning from ear to ear.
“Boss! You have to see this!” he yelled.
The man turned and started jogging down the tunnel he’d just come from. Bosco raised a brow and followed, picking up his axe on the way.
The gathered adventurers mumbled among themselves before a few gathered their things and chased after their boss. After a moment, the cavern was cleared of adventurers, and it once more returned to peaceful silence.
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The scout led the adventurers down the tunnel for almost two more kilometers, farther than he was supposed to have gone. Soon, Bosco could feel why, though. A vibrant spirit energy blew up through the tunnels from somewhere deeper inside. Energy strong enough that even Bosco, a peak [Shackle Breaking] cultivator, could feel the accumulated ache in his body ease, and his heart beat faster.
A few moments later, they neared one last bend in the tunnel, and the scout stopped. He turned around and gestured on with a theatric flair. Bosco narrowed his eyes, wary of some trick or trap, but after a moment, his greed for what he could feel just beyond the bend won out.
Bosco strode past the scout, closely followed by Seeker, and rounded the corner.
Then, he froze, his eyes nearly bulging in his head.
Bosco shot forward, traveling the final distance of the tunnel in only a few strides.
He skid to a stop only a few feet away from the exit as if fearing that if he passed the threshold, what he saw before him would vanish like a dream. He took a deep breath and took that last step, exiting the tunnel and stepping into a large, dimly lit forest.
“Sisters above…” Seeker whispered breathlessly from somewhere behind him.
Bosco barely registered the man’s words. Or the dozen and a half adventurers who streamed from the tunnel behind him. No, his eyes were squarely locked on the sky.
Or rather than a ‘sky’, he stared up at the clearly defined outline of a massive cavern ceiling, far into the distance, speckled with patches of lumoss; like stars in the night sky.
Bosco laughed.
A soft thing at first, but slowly, it grew louder, and soon, his deep, billowing laughter echoed through the massive cavern.