AI Cthulhu Rick truly lived up to his role as the magical AI butler of Cthulhu Rick’s household.
Whatever Cthulhu Rick knew, he knew too.
And whatever Cthulhu Rick didn’t know, or simply hadn’t had time to study, this guy trapped in the log cabin had all the time in the world to learn.
By the time Morty finished eating at the priest’s house, AI Cthulhu Rick had already built a small manufacturing plant.
From wood to steel, then finally to an alloy stable enough to retain its physical form in the environment of outer space, the entire manufacturing process was laid out before Morty’s eyes from start to finish.
Morty had just stuffed himself with grilled meat and desperately needed some time to digest, so this gave him the perfect opportunity.
“Did you make all this by hand?”
“Not entirely.
The main concept is tool automation.”
“What exactly do you mean by ‘tool automation’?”
Even though he knew Morty was trying to steal a few tricks, AI Cthulhu Rick, like every Rick, couldn’t resist showing off his knowledge in front of a Morty.
To them, a smart Morty was like a straight, red-blooded horndog spotting a sexy trans girl, hot at first glance, but the more they looked, the more uncomfortable they got.
So, determined to claw back some pride in the intelligence department, AI Cthulhu Rick kept working with his hands while his mouth ran nonstop.
“The concept of tool automation is essentially a way to keep increasing output throughout the production process.”
“Say you want to cut down a tree.
You realize your fists are useless, so you grab a rock.
But the rock is too inefficient, and then you discover a much harder metal: iron.”
“But iron in its natural form doesn’t make a good axe, so you smelt it and turn it into an iron axe.”
“Then you look up and realize there’s an entire forest in front of you.
Now the problem is that you need N iron axes, but there’s only one of you.”
“At that point, your thinking shifts from making tools to automating those tools.”
“You start with simple machines, move on to more complex ones, and eventually end up with large logging vehicles and robotic logging.”
“So…”
Morty said, “Basically, when you make something, you don’t stop at making it.
You also figure out how to use it while wasting as little of your own time as possible.”
AI Cthulhu Rick said, “Right…”
Morty’s summary left AI Cthulhu Rick at a loss for words.
Now he understood even better why Rick treated this Morty the way he did.
Compared with other Mortys, this one was absurdly smart, and he picked things up frighteningly fast.
Even when it came to having a vicious mouth, he could go toe-to-toe with Rick…
“It’s that fucking simple, and you rambled through all that bullshit?
Why didn’t you start with the creation of the universe while you were at it?”
“‘The main concept is tool automation.'”
“Even a damn caveman knows how to use tools to make his life easier, okay?”
“I think you’ve been stuck in this world for way too long.
You haven’t had enough outside technology kicking your ass.
Your head’s full of nothing but second-hand potions and Deep Ones’ shit!”
“Come on already!
Just tell me how you’re using the resources we have to build a Space Cruiser capable of flying through outer space in a short amount of time!”
After taking that verbal beating from Morty, AI Cthulhu Rick pointed toward a patch of lawn that had been dug up in the distance and gestured for Morty to go see for himself.
Morty headed over.
Buried deep underground was a Space Cruiser, its hull and components already partially dismantled.
“W-where the hell did this thing come from?”
“Just wreckage from the previous era.
What, you thought I had absolutely nothing on me and still managed to build a Space Cruiser and a processing plant in the time it took you to eat dinner?”
Morty stood at the edge of the pit for a few seconds before jumping down into the spacecraft.
It was buried deep beneath the ground, with a huge opening cut through the top.
He switched on his phone’s flashlight, illuminating a corridor of decaying steel where the air reeked of damp earth.
After walking a short distance, Morty rounded a corner and found an old, yellowed diary inside one of the compartments.
Going by what AI Cthulhu Rick had said about the “previous historical period,” Morty figured the diary had to be at least a thousand years old.
After all, once all the knowledge accumulated by a civilization was wiped out at once, as long as people themselves survived, rebuilding from scratch would take roughly another thousand years.
Well, that was only counting the climb from ancient civilization to the near-modern era.
It didn’t include the explosive technological progress that came after computers appeared.
Morty used the translation system to convert the writing into something he could understand, and the diary quickly drew him in.
Ignoring the author’s personal rambling, one idea recorded in the book made Morty realize just how limited his own imagination still was.
In this world where the Cthulhu existed, every intelligent species that advanced from ignorance into an age of reason would inevitably encounter the Cthulhu at some point.
The first intelligent species might have had no idea what they were dealing with.
But as long as the planet itself wasn’t destroyed, relics and scattered fragments left behind by the previous civilization would be passed down like a torch.
And so, by the time of the civilization immediately preceding Morty’s own, someone came up with an insanely bold idea.
Domestication!
Since so many of these Cthulhu-like monsters spent most of their time asleep, couldn’t they build a device to find them, then make use of them?
Setting their sights on non-physical deities was, without question, an unbelievably suicidal idea.
But those people actually fucking did it.
According to the diary, the people of that era had already ventured into the stars, only to discover that the universe seemed to be littered with forbidden zones.
And the masters of those forbidden zones were the Great Old Ones, the Elder Gods, and the Outer Gods.
That was how the God-Hunting Project was born.
They weren’t as clever as Cthulhu Rick, who had simply forged the Sword of Silence, but their goal wasn’t to destroy the Cthulhu-like entities in the first place.
Instead, they wanted to treat them like dogs.
Hunt down those deities, tame them, and put them to work.
That was why this Space Cruiser carried a Reality Generator.
The basic principle was simple.
Since this world had both a mental plane and a physical plane, the Reality Generator used atomic collisions to create an atomic storm within a designated area, disrupting the stable order of both planes.
Chaos produced at such a fundamental level was something even the Cthulhu couldn’t stop.
If they could, Cthulhu wouldn’t have been beaten by the Ancient Ones and forced to sign a peace treaty.
So there was only one problem with the device aboard this ship…
After it was built, aside from experimental testing, it had never once been used in actual combat.
Because the reason this civilization had been destroyed in the first place was that the Great Toad had been at war with the Elder Gods at the time.
The two sides fought for a full hundred years and, in the process, completely wiped this civilization off the face of the world…