nanites in a fantasy

ch 3 diging in

If Sam still had lungs he would be sighing right now. He was aware that slimes were one of the more common monsters in fantasy, and while he was technically not a slime the form his swarm was currently taking was similar to one. He had armored his core with a simple metal box with small holes so he could still connect to the nanobots.

He had been traveling in the same direction for close to a week at this point and he probably covered close to two miles according to his map. He had found another coin and even an old broken knife which he was currently dragging along as he slowly disassembled it adding its metal to his armored cube.

Nothing he'd found so far had been useful and judging by the rising humidity he didn't have much longer before another rainstorm came through. He had climbed a tree a few days ago and spotted an old dead burned out, but massive husk of a tree. If the wood was still in decent enough shape, it would make the perfect place to start setting up a permanent base of operations. Its large limbs reached at least partially above most of the forest canopy making it the perfect spot for the installation of solar panels and signal antennas. It likely had a deep root structure which would be good for reaching deeper underground where he was likely to find more metallic compounds. And a large amount of just empty space inside of it that he could hollow out and make use of. This made it almost ideal for attempting to build larger units. While he had only been able to look at the research screen. He was very aware about the limitations of his nanobots, they were the ultimate multi tool. But they were slow, they had signal reach issues and required near constant recharging. In short, while they were incredibly useful and given enough numbers incredibly powerful it would take an ungodly amount of them to do anything on a particularly large scale. Simple robotics while far beyond his current research capabilities would need to be his next step. Basic drones could be used for everything from construction to resource gathering to exploration and mapping as well as extending his relay capabilities. A simple RC car like drone that could transport the equivalent of a water bottle's worth of nanites to a position could begin construction on just about anything. As he could get basic materials out of the soil and surrounding flora if not fauna. But he currently didn't need to actually start looking for proper locations for facilities such as resource production construction and so on just yet. As he could continue just expanding underground until he found it. True, it was an extremely slow process and not the best use of his resources. But even a simple solar powered aerial drone with a magnet could be extremely useful if he could find some form of civilization to just snatch materials from.

[Warning processor limit reached please reduce stress load or a force restart will be attempted.]

Well, that was a surprise he hadn't seen one of those notifications since he woke up after his last shutdown. He must have really been deep in thought for that to happen, then again he was probably using a lot of his processing power to coordinate the swarm in such an active manner. It took another day for him to reach the tree, and he immediately set to work. While he would have liked to keep his armor it wasn't doing him any good at the moment. Most of his nanobots were put to work freeing his core and digging it down. The thing's roots really did run deep and navigating around them wasn't easy. This was only complicated further by the fact he didn't want to dig through the roots until he had a proper understanding of the current state of the tree. It may have looked rough from the outside but for all he knew it could have been recently struck by lightning and still be alive. He hadn't been in the area long enough to know or not. Better to explore it and the surrounding area than make stupid assumptions that bite him in the butt later and boy did that hold true here. He just barely made it underground before it started raining. What little remained of his armored cube knife and the coin was left abandoned on the surface. As he continued to slowly work his way downward, he discovered something interesting. All the trees in this area of a certain type had interconnected roots. Meaning while the larger tree he had found was extremely badly damaged, it was still very much alive, being kept on life support by the other surrounding trees of the forest. It would probably still die eventually due to its inability to produce its own food. Though he may be able to help with that in time. He'd have to look into doing some research on the subject. But it wasn't uncommon in stories for nanobots to hybridize with organic creatures so why not hear? But that would have to wait till he managed to get somewhere a bit safer and more established.