156 – Upgrades for the whole family

156 – Upgrades for the whole family

“Oh, this is ... disorientating,” Bob mused aloud, stumbling a little as a hand reached up to cradle his temples while the other reached over to grab onto Fae for support. “I can see. I can see so much ... ”

“What’s wrong with him?” Fae asked in worry, turning back to look at me standing a few metres behind with an anxious frown marring her pretty face.

“Nothing is wrong with him of course,” I said, crossing my arms as I nodded at the man. “He just needs a moment to get used to his increased mental capacities and all the new sensory information he is getting.”

I had also upgraded almost every single cell in his body, paying special attention to his brain, circulatory system and bone marrow. With how he was now, he should live for a comfortable five thousand years before his genes started to deteriorate.

Of course, I could just put them back to top condition if I was around, but if not ... well, then I’d likely be far too dead to care what happened to Bob.

When I felt him going from freaking out to curiously looking around, testing his improved senses and the score of sub-brains I’d connected to his main one, I stepped over to him.

“Look at that wall,” I said, pointing off into the distance where the enormous hexagonal walls running around the eventual city limits rose up from the bushy green undergrowth. “Tell me what you see.”

He blinked, his eyes glazing over as I practically felt his thoughts crashing into each other before he wrangled the hundreds of thoughts coming from his sub-brains into order. I smiled, happy with my choice of giving these upgrades to the most stubborn human I’d ever met. If his will was strong enough to keep him alive for centuries, I was sure he could handle his mind getting a few add-ons.

Shaking his head a little, Bob narrowed his eyes and ran his gaze over the towering walls from left to right, his thoughts now working together like the thousand cogs of a great machine.

He had sub-brains shaped to accommodate the mindset of various Mechanicus adjacent ideologies. Some more I’d personally crafted to think like architects of Earth would have thought in the 21st century and the last bunch he had modelled after Earth Caste Tau minds.

I had more upgrades prepared for him, but those would have to wait until I dragged his soul into my Realm. It wouldn’t do to give him psychic upgrades only for some enterprising daemon to latch onto the connection and eat his soul.

It was unlikely, seeing as the man had fought off daemon corruption before, but I was pretty sure those were just idle lesser daemons taking a shot at it out of boredom, not determined daemons of a greater calibre hellbent on doing at least some damage to me to please their masters. Nope, I was not going to risk it.

I was reasonably sure some form of a Chaos retaliation was already on its way to my new world, probably in the form of a Chaos war-band from a nearby world controlled by them. There was a good number of those in the Jericho Reach, more than there were Tau-controlled Systems even.

Not that I was too worried. They’d have to drag a fully manifested Greater Daemon over here, one that would be more powerful than the pseudo-manifestation of Ka’Bandha had been. Maybe a Daemon Primarch.

Anyway, I felt Bob coming to a conclusion and nodding as he turned to me with slight hesitance. I nearly rolled my eyes as I said, “Speak.”

“I see ... imperfections,” he said, eying me like I was going to bite off his head for finding fault with my personal creations. I raised my eyebrow with an easy smile on my lips, which had the desired effect, and he relaxed, finally spitting out his reasons. “It is needlessly large for the sort of wildlife it is supposed to defend from, and it wouldn’t need to be even half as tall or thick to ward off even a dozen Astra Militarum regiments. The materials used should be more than enough in even half the quantities to stop most artillery equipment known to exist in their tracks too. Furthermore ... I’d say the hexagonal design is needlessly specific and doesn’t make use of the natural environment around us, though I am guessing there is a reason for the design beyond just for it to look imposing?”

“I understand,” Fae said resolutely. “What must I do?”

“Wait a moment,” I said, my eyes going distant as I teleported over my pre-made bio-forms made specifically for construction work. There were hundreds of them, with various functions built into them all. I reached out to them, creating a web of psychic power linking up with the psychic nodes I’d placed in them all. I set the hierarchy as I’d wanted it, separating them into scores of different teams and setting leaders for them all before slowly braiding the links, pulling them towards the node I’d placed in Fae. “Ready? This might be disorientating ... or perhaps even painful. I’ve never done anything like this on an Eldar so I have little in the way of a dataset to predict how it’ll go.”

It shouldn’t hurt her, and I was pretty sure it would not kill her, even if I royally fucked it up somehow. If she was alive, I could fix just about anything short of her mind getting obliterated, but I doubted that’d happen. Just brushing up against her mind was enough to tell me that Eldar had much more robust minds than humans.

It made sense. After all, no Eldar has ever fallen to Chaos as far as I knew, not unwillingly at least. Hell, even the Drukhari were just doing what they had to keep themselves alive and not out of any sort of worship for the Prince of Pleasure.

A human mind might as well be a ball of crumpled paper compared to the steely hardness of an Eldar’s mind.

“I am ready,” Fae said and I could feel her mind roiling with glee before she scrunched it up and firmed its boundaries in preparation.

I nodded and as gently as I could manage, linked the telepathic web up with her node and set her as the highest authority in it. She wobbled a little, her eyes closing as she turned her entire focus towards the mental link now banging on the door of her mind.

She cracked open her defences and let in the tiniest trickle of it, letting a mental link of her own braid itself into the mixture before locking it down firmly and not letting it link up to more than she allowed. It seemed almost instinctive to her, like how humans closed their eyes when something came towards it quickly, or how they snapped up their hands to dampen the force of a fall. The Aeldari really were built differently.

When her eyes fluttered open, her gaze jumped around for a bit aimlessly before her head snapped to the side where a hundred leaders of the construction teams stood. They ranged between anything from the Tyranid equivalent of trucks, excavators, bulldozers and just about every shape and for every function me and my mind-cores could come up with. Though a good half of them were more humanoid, with builds mode similar to Astartes, and three pairs of dexterous hands and even a tail I’d made to mimic the functions of a mechadendrite. Those last ones would be the all-purpose builders while the rest would be the ‘equipment’.

I felt a pulse flash out from Fae’s node, race along the braided link and split to head for five of the humanoid bio-forms. They stepped forward, and I watched on with a growing grin as they started something similar to a stretching routine as Fae tested her control over them while also simultaneously getting a grasp of their power.

Soon, they were clawing through the dirt with large, clawed hands acting as shovels while the more dexterous hands worked to grab rocks and lift out boulders to wave them around. I’d given them about as much strength as a regular Astartes would have and Fae was just getting started on getting a grasp on them.

Best of all, while I could feel a strain building up on her as she directly controlled five different bodies at once, it was minor at best. That was good. I had given brains to each worker which would allow them to have some autonomy, leaving Fae to only give them orders, but taking over could be a good way to teach them how to do things better.

Also, once everything was running smoothly, she could just sit back and order around the leaders of the teams, letting them relay her orders to the workers under them and spare her even just this much mental strain.

“Those will be your workers,” I said in a near whisper, nudging Bob with my shoulder as I watched Fae reach for one of the excavator-like bio-forms and make it dig. “Think they’ll be good? Also, if you have any ideas for new types of models, just give me a list with any specifications you have in mind and I’ll make them.”

“These will be perfect,” Bob said with some awe and a lingering sense of underlying queasiness at the sight of something so clearly alien entering his tone. “I ... already have some ideas, if these ones are examples of every ‘model’ I’ll have access to?”

“Well, don’t be shy.” I raised an eyebrow. “I’m all ears. Better ask for them now while I’m near and largely without anything more important for me to do than later.”

“I’ve been thinking of something large that could be used to burrow underground and speed up the construction of any tunnels we’ll need to build,” Bob started, his eyes glazing over as the grand machinery that was now his mind spun. “I’ll also have to ask for something that can elevate some of these workers into the air for the more gargantuan buildings ... perhaps something like arcane, or perhaps a flying platform if either is possible and ... “