Rain World: High Voltage

Prologue: The Great Problem

Unruffled Confidence shifted her small puppet body around inside of her cubical 'can'. Her puppet appeared as a fragile, violet body wearing a simple green dress, and had wide, empty eyes set in a roundish head and two long antennae protruding from her back with three skinny oval marks on her forehead. And all the while, this little puppet of hers was attached to a long robotic arm that roamed along the walls of her small confinement to make up for her puppet's weak, useless limbs. Her can was not really a confinement, but the main core that was part of a whole. Unruffled confidence was actually an enormous supercomputer about a kilometer and a half wide, and a kilometer tall, tall enough to reach past the clouds and the torrential rain that constantly tore at the planet below.

Unruffled Confidence admitted that she was at fault for much of the destruction below, but she wasn't the only one. She was one among many other supercomputers, a.k.a. iterators, who stood upon leg stilts above the line of clouds carrying large and abandoned cities on their backs like impossible beasts rising out of a sea of fatal weather. Every single one of her kind was responsible for the raging storms below, because, in order to continue functioning, one iterator would consume a huge amount of underground water and exhale it in the form of gas into the sky, and they used the energy obtained to run all kinds of processes, such as tending to the society of their creators that lived in their designated cities, running factories, genetically engineering purposed organisms, and so on. But not only was the water used for energy but also to keep slag from building up in her processing strata, because if slag buildup became an issue, then that would mean a long and painful death, which no iterator would ever wish upon themselves. 

Unruffled Confidence's robotic arm rolled up the side of her can's wall, dragging her puppet to the area on her wall where a projection of a complicated map was shone in green, red, and white colors. The ancient symbols of her language blinked and flashed all over the wall, some of them were labels that appeared next to broadcasting pearls that floated in organized formation with help from the antigravity properties in her can that she could switch on and off whenever she wanted. A list of current organisms of all kinds located in her region was projected next to the map. Confidence was busy with work, configuring different traits and genetic combinations for her new species project. This was the kind of thing she would work on in her free time when she wasn't being partially forced to solve the 'big problem' that everyone was mainly built to solve. Though she was already planning to accept the uselessness of such a task and give up, especially with her creators having been... absent, for quite some time. 

Just as she was about to finish building a gene in a string of DNA, a signal caught her attention. It came from one of the levitating pearls, the symbol next to it was flashing red and white, and she summoned it to her side, where it stopped beside a hash mark on a large circle of measurements and equally distanced lines that spun in different directions as a projected halo behind her. The flashing symbol moved across her wall and became a sentence:

1945.325 - PRIVATE Far Truth, Unruffled Confidence

The text blinked three times, then new text appeared beneath it. 

FT: Feral Denial's condition has worsened. The rot has eaten to his core. He is in a lot of pain, and some of his water supply has been cut off. Flushing his facilities have proved useless.

Yes, iterators could feel pain. They may have been a part machine, but were also made of organic parts as well.

When Confidence answered, her reply flickered into view below Truth's message.

UC: And I suppose there is not much hope left in saving him?

FT: Affirmative.

UC: As long as he still has some functionality left, there is still a chance.

FT: I doubt there is any time left to carry out a plan, much less devise one with a high enough success probability. 

Confidence beckoned to an empty space on her wall's screen, and a few camera screens appeared, showing footage from a small chamber that contained a collection of bio bags connected to fluid pumps that Confidence managed herself by taking control over a small group of scavengers to watch over them closely and supervise them. Each and every one of them contained embryos of the same animal, which were soon to outgrow their artificial wombs. As Confidence observed an embryo that had far outgrown its fetus stage and had been growing faster than the others. Some of the most obvious features were already visible: two legs, two arms, large, closed eyes on a round and cuddly face, a chubby tail that ended in two dark pincher claws that had just started to poke out of the skin, and currently the developing orange, square-shaped scutes that traveled from its forehead and all the way down its back to the tip of its tail, and the rest of its body was a lighter orange than the scutes on its back.

Beautiful.

FT: Confidence?

UC: What if I made an airborne poison or pesticide of some sort?

FT: You need a rot sample.

UC: You are correct. 

FT: How will you go about obtaining it? You can't send a scavenger, and you don't have the materials to build any sort of robot to fetch it to you. Even if you did, it would only get infected on contact. Not to mention your eroding equipment.

Just then, Confidence noticed movement on the camera screen that showed the overgrown embryo. The little thing was stretching its legs and arms, and its eyes opened just a crack before closing again.

UC: I have already been working on it. 

FT: You don't have to do so much for a hopeless cause. He brought it on himself.

UC: We need all the help we can get to solve the big problem. Without him, our existence will become even more of a hopeless cause than it already is. After all, focusing on a different project than solving the big problem will be a relief. We don't want me making the same mistake as him, do we? 

FT: Do what you have to.

Unruffled Confidence rolled the base of the robotic arm that supported her puppet across the wall, then the floor, and onto the other wall, allowing her access to move her puppet closer to the pearl floating there. She could have just levitated it towards herself, but life in a can was already too boring for such a simple solution. She cupped it in her hands, staring into its faint glow, tracing the lines of data carved into it with her dark, pupiless eyes. 

UC: You have my word, senior.