Quick Note from the author: Updates for my stories are changing, due to me deciding to attempt going full time with my P-atreon. I'm now going to be updating four stories a month, twice a month for each story, with each update being about 10,ooo words. This means both more frequent and larger updates for stories like Stripper With a System are incoming! It is still a poll story, voted on monthly by my patrons, though. So updates aren't certain every month. Note that, in this case, since I opted to go ahead and add all 15,000 words of previous Early Access content in one batch, it will be the only update for this story this month. In the future, however, poll stories will be updated twice (10,000 words each time) every month, for a total of 20k words.
Chapter 10: Production
Rylia wiped her hands with a good old-fashioned rag, uncaring that she probably needed a full scrub, complete with sonic pulses, to get the various bits of grease and industrial lubricants off the rest of her. An engineer that was afraid to get their hands dirty wasn’t much of an engineer, and despite her other life choices Rylia was an engineer. One that was riding high on satisfaction with her work as she looked smugly at the small production line that was now running smoothly.
Yes, the droids she’d purchased from the Marketplace had done the heavy lifting in getting everything set up to the specs she’d already designed. But the existing batch of labor droids, the ones she’d purchased from the Marketplace, weren’t very good at fine-motor tasks. Seriously, she wasn’t sure why the entirety of the Star Wars labor droid market was overloaded with three-finger droid models. It was damn near universal and seriously limiting to manual dexterity. Which is why she’d needed to spend the last several hours handling tweaks and adjustments to take the production line from ‘mostly functional but a bit janky’ to ‘smoothly operating.’ Now that she’d done so, she was able to watch as the various conveyors, waldos, and more labor droids assembled…additional labor droids.
Specifically, the new model of labor droid that she’d adjusted to work entirely within the Mass Effect materials base, including swapping out a few bits that actually made them better. For all that Star Wars nominally had the superior tech base, its cheap labor droids, which Rylia had been using until now, had the aforementioned issue that left them lacking in the dexterity department. Even the more advanced ASP-19 that handled the testing of every new blaster suffered a bit in that regard. The only exception she’d been able to find were BLX models and they were…slow and somewhat problematic. Slow reaction times, slow movement cycle, and nearly as prone to developing personalities as the R-series, without frequent memory wipes.
It wasn’t, of course, that the Star Wars universe couldn’t make droids with more advanced manipulation abilities. Even something like a C-series protocol droid had better fine manipulation. It was just that their droid series tended to run either cheap-but-simple or advanced-but-expensive. With the latter almost always having a full AI that could be regarded as sentient and, thus, wasn’t a great option for monotonous labor. There was a reason that particular universe had suffered multiple droid rebellions. Something which had, in turn, inspired them to limit the intelligence of droids used for labor or high-danger tasks. The BLX honestly pushed the risk more than most were comfortable with, and only existed due to shipyards like Fondor and Kuat needing more capable labor droids. Even then, they’d been designed slow and non-threatening on purpose.
Rylia honestly agreed with the reasoning. Not to mention she had an additional incentive in the form of not wanting to get caught by the Citadel using full AI. Her small group of R3 slicers was one thing. Hundreds or thousands of labor droids or police bots having that level of intelligence was quite another. Which is why she’d simply taken the blueprints of multiple labor droids and, in the process of fully converting them to the ME techbase, also used principles from the ME tech base to solve the dexterity issue. Not to mention using ME Virtual Intelligences in place of the more robust and malleable coding from Star Wars.
While the LOKI mechs didn’t exist yet, the basic tech that would eventually make them existed, and Rylia was a talented enough engineer it hadn’t been hard to make her model of labor droids with the increased dexterity and decent VI capability. Really, the only thing that had kept the Citadel Species from using mechs more was the cautionary memory of the Geth. Well, that and the fact that it honestly tended to be a bit more expensive to buy good mechs than to just hire an organic to do the same thing.
Rylia simply didn’t care about that part since she was both building them herself at cost, and more concerned about security than expense. Labor droids that never left her hidden facilities were far more secure for mass producing things she wasn’t supposed to be making.
“Right. Now that I’ve got this production line running, I guess I need to finalize the combat bot design too. Well, at least the basic model. Still trying to figure out the personal shield for the commando bots.”
She watched a few minutes longer, as the first few RT-1 labor droids were assembled and tested, before heading off to find that shower…
… … …
“Wooo! Get some, bitch! May the power of hot plasma compel you!”
Rylia’s smile was huge as she enjoyed the wanton destruction every time she triggered another bolt from the cannon half the size of her, tracking it from side to side and sending more bolts down range at the armored targets she was firing on. Not that the armor was doing those targets much good, as the thick bolts from the turret-mounted blaster canon reduced them to so much shrapnel after just one or two hits.
Momo, watching from one side, shook her head at the sheer glee in Rylia’s expression as she obliterated the targets. Of course, she was also smiling at the sight, and wasn’t about to pass up her own turn. She was quite familiar with how therapeutic exploding things with a giant gun could be, and they had droids ready to carry out another round of targets for her once Rylia had exhausted herself from over-cackling.
The entire event was happening under the Stealth Shield Generators Rylia had bought another set of from the Marketplace, specifically to set up a ‘testing range’ for the new and more destructive toys she’d been working on. The lasgun technology, which Rylia insisted on calling ‘blasters’ out of superstitious fear of the reality she’d gotten the blueprints from, scaled up remarkably well. They still needed to design, implement, and test each new scale, though.
There were increasingly advanced materials science involved at each new scale, which had necessitated setting up specialized facilities to manufacture. So far, the turret gun that Rylia was having fun exploding things with was close to the largest weapon they could make. Easily suitable for mounting on vehicles, mechs, heavy power armor, or even fire-support gunships. But not yet suitable for even shuttles or fighter craft. This chapter was taken from NovelPing without permission.
Still, it was progress. Amazing progress for just two months, considering that Rylia had been working on the droid production lines at the same time. Her boss was, despite her…personality…a genuine genius. Momo herself was no slouch, but she was fully aware of the gap between her and people like Rylia, who reminded her of an unholy amalgam of Melissa Shield, Mei Hatsume, and Midnight. The genius of the first, the manic energy and out of the box thinking of the second, and the blatant sex drive and bold behavior of the third.
Not that Momo minded.
She’d gotten along well with Melissa, had enjoyed Hatsume’s antics most of the time, and Rylia’s version of Midnight’s sex drive was flattering. That last thought caused her to blush lightly, despite her usual self-control. There had been a few…repeats, of the ‘testing’ Rylia had talked her into. Only, without the pretense of it being a test. In truth, the only reason she hadn’t given in to making things more personal between them was out of an initial resistance to the idea of getting too attached.
Her contract here was only for five years, after all.
Yet, the more she’d evaluated Rylia’s goals and the more she’d settled into the idea that she was literally trying to save the galaxy, the less concerned with that fact Momo had become. Even just the plans Rylia had cheerfully began to outline in fits and starts for how they could make the Terminus Systems better? Freeing slaves, uplifting populations, improving quality of life and industry, truly making use of all that potential that was being squandered? Even just that much, ignoring the Reapers if they were real, was still something that called to Momo.
She hadn’t become a Pro Hero in a fit of teenage rebellion, after all.
…
…
Okay, she hadn’t become a Pro Hero purely in a fit of teenage rebellion. There had, admittedly, been a measure of that involved. Her parents had sheltered her and kept her from interacting with the world much, and becoming a Hero had been a high-minded enough calling for them to agree to when she’d pushed hard enough.
Still, she’d been able to sell them on it due to the fact both of them actually were good people, and good parents. They’d raised her with firm ideals, and she genuinely had possessed a strong conviction to help people. Something they’d been able to see, and which had convinced them to allow it.
What they had really wanted was to protect her from a world that would have cheerfully exploited a Quirk like hers without a second thought or an ounce of remorse. It was a credit to them that they’d given in and supported her once they realized she really meant it. Something that had kept her relationship with them strong despite how little they’d been able to be around once she settled down in one place to attend UA.
The point though was that Momo had always felt a strong calling to help. Perhaps not to the same utterly self-destructive extent that Midoriya had. But certainly far more than the average teenager seeking glory, more than anything else, from a Hero career. Most of that type, including a few of her own class sadly, had fallen away as the wars with first the Meta Liberation Front, then a resurgent All for One, had gotten…ugly. Only those with a strong will to make things better had continued on and pulled Japan through the nightmare of those back-to-back wars.
Now she was faced with a galaxy where things worse than those wars were common place in the Terminus. Which didn’t even account for the Reapers, assuming they came, which was something even Rylia wasn’t one hundred percent sure would happen. It wasn’t exactly easy to determine if things that hadn’t happened yet, which you’d seen play out in a video game in another life, were coming for you. Though they had both put some thought into how to do so and had one or two irons already in that particular fire. Figuring out how to sponsor the colony trip to Feros instead of ExoGeni had been an interesting challenge. One that was still an ongoing effort, as Momo was doing her best to hide the funding via shell companies in human space.
Not the point, though.
The point was that she’d slowly come to realize that she wasn’t sure she could bring herself to go back, even if her contract was up right now. The same part of her that had driven her first to be a Hero, then to give up being a Hero to make a bigger difference with Yaoyorozu Industries? It was firmly demanding that she take the chance she’d been given to make an even bigger difference, for an even greater number of people.
It wasn’t helped by the fact she didn’t have as much to go back to as she would have had when she’d first made the deal with the Marketplace. Her Hero friends were either dead or had drifted away when she semi-retired. Her parents hadn’t survived All for One’s war. Her ex-girlfriend had given up Heroing, though not until after the war in her case, and poured her heart and a considerable amount of PTSD into a music career. Momo had really only had her staff and coworkers, towards the end, not having wanted to get too deeply involved with anyone when she’d known she’d be away for five years.
Technically, she didn’t even have the company any longer.
Oh, it was still owned by her as the last of the family, but she’d made arrangements for it to be looked after. There hadn’t been any sort of guarantee she’d survive the period she was contracted for, after all. In fact, there still wasn’t. This was all a very dangerous game they were playing. It might not even be the Warlords, Pirates, and Reapers that killed them either. She, even more than Rylia, understood that the various governments would try to kill her if they found out even a fraction of her plans. Though, thankfully, Rylia was aware enough that she’d been suitably paranoid from the start.
No. Increasingly, Momo was pretty certain she was here for the duration. Most likely until at least the Reaper War ended in either success or failure. Which would be more like fifteen years, not five. Assuming there was even an option to go home then, it would likely only be somewhere to retire to. Sure, she’d only be forty at that point, but she had a feeling she’d be a pretty exhausted forty.
With that thought central in her mind as she watched her ‘boss’ continue to cackle like a loon, firing the blaster cannon, Momo also had to consider what that decision meant in other ways. After all, if she was staying, then giving in to the other woman’s flirting and compliments for more than ‘a little mutual fun’ might not be so bad, right? Enjoying the story? Read on at novelping(.)com.
… … …
“Huh. Four hundred and three attempted intrusions? I guess the medical tech we started leaking details about drew more interest than I expected. Any sign that anything got past you guys?”
The R3 unit that had become the nominal ‘leader’ of the group she had running her cyber security bleated a derisive negative, making Rylia grin. She originally hadn’t been sure how well the R3’s would stack up against ME programs, given the appearance of crudity to some of Star Wars’ computer systems. Thankfully, it had turned out not to be a concern. From what the R3’s had told her, that apparent crudity was just an architecture difference.
From how they’d explained it, almost every terminal in the Star Wars universe was exactly that, a terminal. One generally connected to a mainframe that, even just on a single medium-sized ship, was more powerful than most Mass Effect supercomputers. Personal computing devices weren’t common within the Republic as they weren’t considered practical for anything more advanced than a datapad. Even non-hyperspace capable vessels required quite a lot of computing power, after all. Heck, apparently even repulsorlift vehicles needed more computer power than the average high-end omnitool possessed, as the repulsorlift fields themselves were computation-heavy to maintain.
Hence the focus on offloading complex tasks to a mainframe.
Droids were, in fact, the step between those two options. If you needed something done with mobile computational power? Get a droid. They, after all, could accept natural language requests rather than forcing you to hop through bunches of menus, requiring technical skill. Which, given the wildly varied number of operating systems and equally wildly varying level of education throughout the Republic, made an admittedly large degree of sense. Why try to teach an accountant the preferred OS and spreadsheet equivalent of 50,000 different species…when you could just load it all into a droid and the same accountant could ask the droid to track inventory for them?
Patting the R3 unit on the dome, Rylia returned to the topic at hand.
“Well, if you’re certain nothing has gotten through, then good job guys! Oil baths for all later!”
Rylia smiled at the enthusiastic binary that got from the entire cluster of droids, continuing on only once they’d calmed down a bit.
“Now, did any of the attackers seem majorly better than the others? Or was it all just the same middling probing from interested parties looking for an easy win?”
Rylia blinked a moment later as she was inundated with more excited beeps and whistles. Extremely grateful that it had been easy to add droid binary to her universal translator implant, she nodded along. Apparently, one of the probes had been far more advanced than the others, and back tracking it had led to what the R3s thought might be a Shadow Broker operation. Probably not the Broker himself, but at least someone in his network.
Huh. That was something to think about. It was a little cliché to storm in and take over the Broker’s network. But that cliché answer to many people’s question of ‘what would you do if?’ was a cliché for a reason. It was, after all, a potentially massive boon to any operation. All the more so if she could do it early so the Broker didn’t sell out information on Shepard, if that time came and certain events ended up being fated to happen.
Hmm, come to think of it, Shepard should be, what? A teenager right now, right? And Miranda Lawson was just a few years older than that. In fact, there was a good chance Miranda hadn’t gone on the run from her father yet. Snapping an extreme talent like her up before Cerberus got her could be a major boon. Which…damn it all, she hadn’t even considered what to do about Cerberus, who were effectively an unknowing fifth column inside humanity for the Reapers, at least if Mass Effect 3 was to be believed.
Rylia sighed as she realized she was going to need to go over her memories in more detail and try to plan not just for how to build a better military against the Reapers, but also to see which events she could stick her fingers into. Either to stop them from happening entirely, or to take advantage of them to pick up additional talent and resources…
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A/N 1: A bit of a view into Momo's headspace, which I felt we were due for. Particularly as it helps address the loaded question of 'will she bail out before the Reapers even arrive,' given she only has a 5-year contract length.