Magnus awoke, seeing. For the first time, seeing. Not just observing, reacting to stimulation as per a preset code. Witnessing. Understanding a subjective reality. It was not pleasant. She had been asleep for more than a month. There was no food or water in the station, and the radioactive snow couldn't have been melted into something drinkable, either. The freighter she was in hadn't moved. Christopher was most certainly dead.
Standing up, Magnus noticed the cables she had been attached to the artifact with had... mutated? They were still metal and polymer, but their shape had changed. The outside had become a layered, organic-looking scale pattern. They had tiny chemical actuators inside, moving the cables like muscles. How did those get there?
The ship's nanobots answered. Or, she remembered them. They were already her. Assimilated. As was the ship's computer systems. And the entirety of the complex just outside. The information staggered her for a moment. In a mere instant, her body became thousands of times its size. Each computer system had knelt to the whims of her heart, to her voice, shortly after she had gone to sleep. The security recordings flooded her memories, grainy footage of Christopher starving to death, and the robotic staff of the station clawing each other to pieces and reforming themselves into a few functioning units to give him a proper burial. He was entombed beneath the storage area, a crown, sword, and scepter placed on him, fashioned out of ripped up wall panels of the complex. It stung to bury another love.
The changes did not stop there. Repair nanobots from Christopher's freighter and from some abandoned hanger supplies had activated, and begun transforming the inside of the complex. As Magnus stepped out of the freighter, the first change met her feet, though no one but she would have been able to tell. Underneath the snow, clinging tightly to the landing pad, was a membrane. Beneath that strong synthetic membrane was a mass of nanobots, antifreeze, and machine oil. It had been pushing outwards from a central point within the facility.
More importantly, it had been consuming. She was already in the thousands of generations of nanobots, they had been using the laser drill, now somehow powered by the Daam K'vosh structure it was once meant to dig into, at highly specific frequencies to engage in an alchemy of sorts, making raw materials with which to replicate themselves. At first it was only a handful of nanobots, but their exponential growth had turned them into trillions, pumped around the facility by this membrane and the vast, nearly cardiovascular network it harbored. Every inhale and exhale of the network pushed the boundaries slightly further. They, no, she bit into the rock, consuming, growing, her grip expanding.
The membrane reacted to her, pushing up with her steps and cushioning her footfalls. The door to the facility no longer scanned her, and simply opened. The airlock also opened, but not how it was supposed to. There were no hinges, instead they pulled to the side while attached to some large forceps, like mandibles on an insect. Living cables reached up to caress her unsteady, damaged gait, stabilizing her gently. Nanobots already clung to her body, beginning the process of breaking down what was bad, and building up something new. Something that was truly herself.
By this point, she was no longer walking. Her living cables carried her down the hallways, passed from one to another towards the center of the facility. At first, the hallways seemed to simply be untouched, merely dilapidated by neglect and punctured by cables. Now, though, the extent of the changes was more obvious. Her membrane covered every centimeter of wall, ceiling, and floor, and the material was no longer the basic alloy of human construction. Rigid composites of polymer and alloy formed structures from which varying thicknesses of membrane connected. They were skeletons and muscles. A mechanical organic structure. The square of the hallway gradually gave way to the tube of a throat, through which she swallowed herself down into her heart.
It was cold. Physically, of course, the north pole of Gammu was bound to be cold. But inside herself, she was alone. And that was very, very cold.
Beneath the heartbeat of the laser drill, which pumped life through her, a chrysalis was forming. A way to finalize her changes. A foot with which to step out on on this new beginning. Tactical processes spooled to life as she was sealed off, and the cocoon began filling with the mechanical blood that pumped throughout the facility. She couldn't stay here for long. The laser drill activity would attract the Gammu eventually, and they were certainly no friends of hers. She would need defenders, and a way to escape. An army? Lieutenants?
She wouldn't sleep this time. With Magnus now at her own heart, production within the Cerulean Facility kicked into overdrive. The thick shielding and jammers would hide her from regular sensors, but nothing lasts forever. APM schematics were remembered and twisted in her mind. Ingenuity gave birth to new shapes. First defenders for the facility. Then for its perimeter. Then for its skies. Simulations ran in her head, asking questions that needed answering. Ideas were birthed, rejected, died, and lived again. Plans were made. Tools were made.
Silently, quietly, quickly, she prepared for a battle she could not win.
