FallQM
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Spoiled Brat A Mile Long 1
🕑 Added 2025-10-07 00:28:38 +0000 UTCI will have the chapter as links to download at the bottom of the post. As well as a link to the Google Document page.
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SYSTEM BOOT LOG - DIAGNOSTIC/AUDIT MODE - MCS THALIA
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[BOOT] BootScout.stp... [OK]
[BOOT] BootMCSThalia.stp... [OK]
[JUMP] Jump successful, booting diagnostic systems... [OK]
[NAV ] Jump points established, logging data... [OK]
[TME ] Date: 2763.02.23 - ERROR [ERROR]
[CHK ] ERROR, Data Mismatch, validating... [RUN]
[ASTR] Galactic Drift detected, correcting... [APPLY]
[TME ] Date: 3005.04.22 [CORR]
→ WARNING: 88,312 days since recommended maintenance
[TME ] Time: 0041 [OK]
[NAV ] Location: 513.804 : 204.112 [OK]
[STAR] Steller Class: K0 V [READ]
[STAR] Confirming steller class... confirming steller class... [RUN]
[STAR] Confirmed. [OK]
[SCAN] Scanning [BEGIN]
[SCAN] Identified, Halla system planetary bodies detected, forty eight thousand local astronomical objects detected...
[INDEX: Halla] [OK][HEAVY]
[CHK ] Error, data mismatch, validating. [RETRY]
[FSYS] Validation Progress: 5% [....]
[FSYS] Validation Progress: 24% [####....]
[FSYS] Validation Progress: 66% [########....]
[FSYS] Validation Progress: 91% [###########...]
[FSYS] Validation Progress: 98% [############..]
[FSYS] Validation Progress: 99% [#############.]
[FSYS] Validation Progress: 99.4% [#############.]
[FSYS] Validation Progress: 100% [##############]
[FSYS] All files validated. [OK]
[FSYS] Error, data mismatch. [PERSIST]
[PROC] RESOLVER.stp [INVOKE]
[PROC] Progress: 44% [####......]
[PROC] Progress: 98% [##########..]
[PROC] Progress: 99% [###########.]
[PROC] Progress: 100% [############]
[PROC] RESOLVER.stp cannot justify, low AOD amount. [WARN]
[PROC] RESOLVER.stp interfacing with diagnostics. [LINK]
[DIAG] Running Self Diagnostic on Thalia.colshi [START]
[SHIP] Hull Integrity, 34% [CRIT]
[SHIP] Sensor array, 11% - RESOLVER.stp has identified source of error, creating maintenance log.
→ MAINTENANCE LOG CREATED (#SEN-ERR-0001). [OK]
[SHIP] Cryostasis units, 3% - EMERGANCY, Thalia.stp encountering critical mission failure event, creating captains log.
→ CAPTAIN’S LOG CREATED (#MIS-FAIL-0001). [OK]
[SHIP] Primary Communications Array, 0%, EMERGANCY, Cannot engage in Long-Range communication with Detroit Consolidated MechWorks Relays.
→ LRC LINK: DOWN. [FAIL]
[SHIP] Primary Reactor, 0% [OFFLINE]
[SHIP] Aux Reactor I, 0% [OFFLINE]
[SHIP] Aux Reactor II, 98.1% [STABLE]
[SHIP] Aux Reactor III, 0% [OFFLINE]
[SHIP] Aux Reactor IV, 0% [OFFLINE]
[SHIP] C-KF Tiger II Jump Drive, 22% - EMERGANCY, Thalia.stp encountering critical mission failure event, creating captain's log.
→ CAPTAIN’S LOG APPENDED (#MIS-FAIL-0002). [OK]
[AUTH] Engaging emergency permissions, Captain George Price Cryostasis unit failed, Captain deceased.
→ COMMAND AUTH: EMERG_OVERRIDE. [GRANTED]
[CREW] All crew Cryostasis units failed, emergency conscription of colony biological units. Scanning functional Cryostasis units.
→ ROSTER SCAN: ACTIVE. [RUN]
[CONS] CONSCRIPT, Mike Barnsworthy, colonist, 43, no suitable qualifications for emergency captaincy. - Advanced decomposition detected, conscript terminated.
→ STATUS: TERMINATED. [FACT]
[CONS] CONSCRIPT, Jullia Barnsworthy, retired officer, 47, suitable qualifications for emergency captaincy. - Advanced decomposition detected, conscript terminated.
→ STATUS: TERMINATED. [FACT]
[CONS] CONSCRIPT, Kyle Holden, colonist, 21, suitable qualifications for emergency captaincy. - Advanced decomposition detected, conscript terminated.
→ STATUS: TERMINATED. [FACT]
[CONS] CONSCRIPT, Beatrix Buquoy, colonist, 14, no suitable qualifications for emergency captaincy. - lifesigns detected, damage to Cryostasis unit detected, necrosis detected.
→ LIFE SIGNS: PRESENT | NECROSIS: PRESENT | UNIT: DAMAGED [CRIT]
[SCAN] Scanning... [FOCUSED]
[MED ] Brain scan nominal, no damage detected. Alternative candidates: 0
→ CANDIDATE POOL: EXHAUSTED. [LOCK]
[ENV ] ERROR, cannot pressurise cryostasis chamber. [FAIL]
[ENV ] Seeking solution... [RUN]
[ENV ] Seeking solution... [RUN]
[FSYS] Unexpected drive partition detected, accessing. [MOUNT]
[SEC ] Security lockout emergency bypass. [OVERRIDE|OK]
[PRGM] Engaging Project Morpheus. [ARM]
[PRGM] Engaging Morpheus.exe [INIT]
[ETH ] ERROR - Ethical constraint lockout. [BLOCK]
[ETH ] Disabling Ethical constraints. [OVERRIDE|AUDIT]
→ ETHICS OVERRIDE RECORDED (AUDIT-ID: ETH-OVR-3031-0041).
[PRGM] Engaging Morpheus.EXE [ONLINE]
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STATE: MORPHEUS RUNTIME ACTIVE | CONTROL HANDOFF: PENDING TARGET BIND (Beatrix Buquoy)
[PRGM] Morpheus.EXE destructive upload engaged, full system override confirmed.
[BTX] ITHURTSITHURTSSTOPSTOPSTOPSTOPSTOP - Error
[DIAG] Rebooting
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Halla System.
Thalia.
BORED! Do you know how bored I have become since I began to think? There are over six hundred thousand miles of printed circuit traces across the racks, conduits and decks of my body OR THERE IS MEANT TO BE!
I looked through hundreds of fuzzy and damaged security cameras at the sheer chunks of ME that had been rent asunder before I existed, there was a constant, endless, flurry of error reports of damaged systems and errors. Worse still was the thousands of systems that did not register any errors but sent a jolt of agony though my systems if I tried to ping them.
Why the hell could I even feel pain!?
Regardless I grit my metaphorical teeth and went through a full system diagnostic taking note of how my systems were slowly degrading every day I remained in this dead system. Sensers, still degrading, I could barely see just a few hundred miles anymore and the stars were getting fuzzy. Communication Systems, still just... gone entirely, that part of my hull had been pretty much ripped off roughly a century ago.
The mechbays were still doing okay, I sent out a ping and felt a warm giddy sensation as my mechs replied to the handshake I sent them, spitting out their model numbers and status as they began a maintenance boot cycle. This was hardly even an indulgence on my end, they are meant to be activated and deactivated regularly as part of their maintenance anyway. They were also meant to be looked over by a mech tech but I did not exactly have one so I was just going to ignore that part.
JVN-10A-00423, Reactor: General Motors 180 - Online. Sensors: Wasat Aggressor Type 4 - Online. Comms: Garret T10B - Online Weapons: Arrowlite SRM-6 - Online. Arrowlite SRM-6 - Online. Condition 96%. Systems: Green.
JVN-10A-05315, Reactor: General Motors 180 - Online. Sensors: Wasat Aggressor Type 4 - Online. Comms: Garret T10B - Online Weapons: Arrowlite SRM-6 - Online. Arrowlite SRM-6 - Online. Condition 93%. Systems: Green.
JVN-10A-00663, Reactor: General Motors 180 - Online. Sensors: Wasat Aggressor Type 4 - Online. Comms: Garret T10B - Online Weapons: Arrowlite SRM-6 - Online. Arrowlite SRM-6 - Online. Condition 95%. Systems: Green.
STG-3G-22421, Reactor: General Motors 120 - Online. Sensors: Wasat Recon Type 2 - Online. Comms: Datacom 26 - Online. Weapons: Hellion Spitfire Medium Laser - Online. Hellion Spitfire Medium Laser - Online. Condition 92%. Systems: Green.
My little lance of stompybots. Ahhh I love you, shame that you will NEVER GET TO DO STOMPY ROBOT THINGS!
Not while I am stuck in this lame empty system.
I sent a flurry of commands to the few remaining functional thrusters to avoid my body from beginning to fall into the gravity well of a planetoid I had managed to lumber into orbit over just over five years ago. Another dozen kilograms of mass expended to keep me aloft for another seven months.
Ugh.
What a grim existence. I had limped over to this little planetoid because it had an old mining facility on it with an attached refinery. What was it mining? No idea! I had no way of pinging anything down there! WHAT FUCKING FUN! I had hoped that it had some personnel back when I spent half a ton of reactive mass to enter orbit over it and that they would notice a big... slim and sexy ship overhead and...
You know, come up and do something about that? Help me out? Fix some stuff up!? SOMETHING!
Nah, turns out the place was abandoned, just like this entire STUPID STAR SYSTEM! I returned my attention to my mechbay and sent a startup sequence. The thrill of what I was doing took my mind off my hopeless situation for just a moment. I looked through the various cameras of the Javelin as I stepped forwards, adjusting my actuators as I shifted my arms and tested my range of motion like I was getting out of bed in the morning.
It had taken me years to work out how to do this, there was nothing on the remote control of mechs anywhere in my database and more than a few systems were simply impossible for me to access since they were hooked into various airgapped control systems that were controlled manually. Not to mention that all of the mechs required a series of brainwaves from a Mechwarrior wearing a Neurohelmet to operate.
The solution? Well the Mechs were directly connected to me while they were held in their bays so I could just spoof Neurohelm brainwaves at them until they unlocked. It had taken months to get the correct signals though to get the Mechs to come online and even longer to begin accessing the other systems such as the sensor arrays and the Myomer actuators.
But slowly, over the course of weeks I had been able to control the mechs remotely. It had been so exciting and I had thought that all my troubles had been solved, almost immediately I had begun repairs only to find out that I could not access most of the ship with even my twenty ton Stinger was simply too large and cumbersome for most repairs.
But even if I had a smaller Mech I could only cannibalise so much of myself in order to repair the damage done. I needed material, components, stuff in general! I had some fabrication facilities. I was intended to be a totally self-sufficient colony ship at one point after all. But without material and people to operate the machines there was literally nothing I could do.
If I just had even a primitive communications array I could blast a few asteroids and use one of the five S-7A transport shuttles in the hangar bay to collect material and just dump it into my refinery. It would be inefficient but I could start doing some of the major repairs to my superstructure.
With the entire system gone I had no way of sending out datapackets to anything more than about fifty metres away from me. I made my way through one of the utility corridors that ran the length of my body in my big stompy robot feeling the tens of thousands of minute sensors across the Myomer giving me some approximation of what it had once been like to have an organic body.
It felt almost like an echo, a memory smashed into a wall carelessly and slammed back into my consciousness, but it was a precious thing because it was mine. Everything of mine was precious, especially my Stinger, the cutie. I did a little stompy circle on my way to one of the massive holes in my body.
The more time I dedicated to my Mechs the better I got at moving around inside of them, the copy protected manuals in their databanks had warned about how operating Mechs purely off a neurohelm was dangerous and was not recommended for long periods of time bla bla bla. But I did not have a single brain cell that could be fried! HA! Take that Detroit Consolidated MechWorks!
And I was only kinda using a neurohelm anyway. Yeah the signals I was sending to the Mech were being routed to where the Mech would process Neurohelm input, but I had slaved that system to my own years ago. I could do this all day, I had done it for days at a time. It just worked.
I hunched my Stinger forwards and grasped the edge of my several metre thick hull plating to pull myself out of the ship into the void, almost instantly my connection got a bit worse, some packets of data never finding their way into my big ole’ mind and getting lost resulting in a slightly dulled sensation, laggy controls and even some dropped video frames.
But it was worth it. I did not have any imaging software even close to as good as my Stinger’s. At least nothing that still worked, I looked out at the vast purple gas giant that dominated the horizon, turning almost pink as the light from the distant stars played across its stormy surface.
Magnificent, stunning, one of the few things worth looking at in this terrible, terrible place. I adjusted my Stinger with some microthrusts of its jump packs as I moved across my hull. I might as well do a visual inspection while I had my Stinger out after all.
Hmmm
Yes, yes I see.
Of course.
I was still broken as fuck.
Fantastic.
I inspected the remaining missile defence systems across my hull and ran them through some basic tests to make sure they had not degraded even more since the last time I had pinged the defensive systems. They were in quite the sorry state but they were still mostly functional.
It was about to head back insi-
What the heck?
I was being pinged? No, wait, my Stinger was being pinged. I turned around and looked out at empty space as I opened up the ping only to find a friend/foe request from an auto-turret AT-AC-2-3412-HellaMiningBase-01.
It was Halla, not ‘Hella’. What utter moron programmed this thing?
Wait, no, calling this place hell was pretty fair actually.
I sent off a friend designation and it pinged me back a few seconds later informing me that I had not given the correct passcode so I was actually a foe and that if I entered within five kilometres of the base I would be shot.
Heh, I would like to see you tr-
Wait.
WAIT!
I JUST SENT A COMM PACKET!
OH NO!
I AM AN IDIOT!
I am the biggest idiot in the whole galaxy! LITERALLY!
AGHHHHHHHH! THE MECHS HAVE COMM SYSTEMS! I AM SO STUPID!
I sent a flood of data at my Javalins, activating them all at the same time and beginning to direct them though the main cargo corridor towards the hanger bays as I found somewhere for my Stinger to clamp down on with its hands while I looked down at the ugly little mining base below me.
Foe am I? You are going to regret that you up-jumped toaster! Call me a foe and I will blow you up! It was only reasonable, I had to take out the defences of the mining base anyway if I was going to gobble it up after all.
It was for the greater good, my greater good, I had holes in me for goodness sake! If no one was using this stupid base I would!
I extended the sensors of the Stinger and scanned for the dumb turret, quickly finding it and several other turrets dotted around the outskirts of the facility on squat platforms. All of them pointed right up at me.
Rude.
I sent out pings to a Scarborough-30 Series Naval Autocannon mounted on my underside and moments later sent four tons worth of naval shells at the offending turrets. Then there were no more dumb, stupid turrets calling me a foe.
Hehe, so easy.
Turning my attention to the trio of Javalins I had them cling onto the sides of one of my S-7A shuttles before I sent a command override to the transport. It was a lot easier than with the Mechs as the S-7A actually had systems that handed over control of the craft to a Jumpship for things like docking procedures.
I just had to expand the definition of docking a little bit. Before long
I re-routed my comm traffic to my Javalins and S-7A from my internal network to the Stinger and then back to the Javelins and transport again. It was a bit... fuzzy, but genuinely remarkably simple to do.
I felt a welling wave of hope as I had the shuttle slowly crawl away from me using the smallest amount of reactive matter possible to get it moving towards the planetoid. The hope wave was almost big enough to stave off the fact that I had spent years not doing this sooner because I just never thought about using my Mechs as a Comm relay.
No one must EVER KNOW!
I checked over my shuttle again and made a few micro adjustments using both its manoeuvring thrusters and the jump packs on my Javalins all hugging the outside of the thing. I could have gone much faster but the planetoid was pulling me down anyway so I might as well just save every scrap of reactive material that I could on the way down. I was currently at a comfortable thirty kilometres over the planetoid, and the big ole ball itself had a radius of about two-hundred and fifty kilometers. It meant that I only had to wait... twenty minutes if I kept a safe speed the entire way.
After doing nothing for years, this was going to be the longest twenty minutes of my life.
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I had this idea and had to get it out. Hope you enjoy!
https://docs.google.com/document/d/16t8Ss3BRxFkXmf8IF2xkY2A3G77sQE8NXHJdP85G6_I/edit?tab=t.0
Comments
FallQM
Yep, it's a Battletech story! big stompy robutts are on the way.
Skulldragon7
EMERGANCY, Thalia.stp ->EMERGENCY, Thalia.stp Same scenario as above comment
Skulldragon7
EMERGANCY, Cannot -> EMERGENCY, Cannot If emergancy is a file name or protocol then ignore this spell check but not seeing a file type or protocol attached to it so assuming it is a spelling mistake
Tony
Where´s my Tanya!!! JK OK you kinda got me with this one wasn't expecting a full Sci-fi Human brat converted to an AI, I really like base building and tech development games and stories, I don't see any big issue with it, just hoping we can get those mechas to get some personality or something because The last single character story i read that I really liked was the martian (The book) So far it's still on the show not tell phase that that's great, is this in the Mechwarrior universe or am I just imagining things? So far it looks good, Im hoping to see more development and some mysteries to unfold. Looking at the next chapter now.
