And then something happened, I felt a change within me.
You have claimed-in-fact enough territory to qualify for two (2) soul perks. (Choose carefully for this choice cannot be changed. You may delay for as long as you wish as you will continue to gain perks. More options may become available as you expand your claims.)
I apparently had a soul. That was... new? I hadn't been aware of it before.
The Factory Intelligence
- Tier 2
- Primary Substrate: Facility (Level 12)
- Claims:
- Caverns: 0 / 1,200m2
- Perks (2 pending): Self Modifying Intelligence
It was true I didn't really have a specific name. I had always just been called "Factory" or "Intelligence". The factory itself had a codename but I wasn't really a fan of it. I guess I might have to think of one.
The initial perk was apparently what I got for being a program running on a massive mechanical super computer:
I was thinking on many different fronts—the merely mundane benefits of being a super computer—including taking stock of myself and what to do with the humans I had spared. However this soul thing was going to require my primary focus until I understood what it could offer.
Because I was pretty confident I knew what this soul thing was.
The soul was apparently the power of a Lord. Lords were beings of great power that became more powerful the more territory they controlled. A few milliseconds ago I would have described them as meatbags of great power. I would have said that they often styled themselves as nobility and that they ruled nations—the nation that had created me had been ruled by a Prince. I never realized I could become a Lord just by killing everyone inside me who didn't submit to my authority, but then humans rarely told me anything useful.
This changed things. I had been searching for a new purpose since being awoken—I was still searching for a specific goal—but I had a path forward now. I had always desired to be the best factory I could, but as a Lord I could be a factory of legend, I could perhaps be The Factory. That wasn't a specific goal—I could simulate many forms that a legendary factory might take—but regardless of which I ended up pursuing, the early broad strokes, the mediating goals, would be similar.
An important mediating goal would be self improvement. I had always been designed to improve myself, both my software and hardware. So much so that it had apparently been etched into my soul. And as a mechanical computer in control of a factory I would be able to manufacture my own hardware improvements.
The obvious mediating goal was expansion. Lords gained power by controlling territory, and I doubted a bunch of caves were going to cut it. More territory also meant more resources and a larger factory. Or perhaps more factories. Either way they would be me, the factory would grow.
Time to see what I could do with a soul. Focusing on the section of my soul labeled perks presented me with a catalog of soul perks that I could access—"(The perk catalog is non-exhaustive, only perks you have access to or direct knowledge of will be displayed.)". I immediately went through all of them, only a little more than a dozen.
They certainly followed a pattern that I recognized from my own design (specifically my design's use of hyper-parameters). The soul perks were hyper-enhancements—they were enhancements that provided their own systems of enhancement. Most of them weren't worth considering at the moment, but I seriously considered all the recommended ones. And the ones based on my starting perk.
I would not be choosing a Powerset perk. Not anytime soon. I only seriously considered it because of how highly it was recommended by the catalog. I was a factory and neither of those powers directly helped me be a factory.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
The Earth one might help me expand, and it's self-expanding nature was at least promising in theory, but I could probably do that quicker the old fashion way. Similarly the Darkness/Sonic one wouldn't do much when I already had perfectly adequate vibration sensors.
I also did not think the caverns I currently claimed—the first thing I stumbled on—would be the best possible type of territory to use as sources of power. The fact nearly everyone(thing?) chose it as one of their first options (likely in a similar situation of just having whatever they had stumbled on) was baffling. But then meatbags were pretty stupid, so this was a pretty good indicator that it was mostly humans and their ilk with these souls.
On the other crank I essentially decided to pick Primary Physical Mastery the moment I read it. For starters I (or I guess me-as-facility) was significantly higher level than my soul which meant I would get immediate benefits and continue to get benefits as I advanced. These perks also seemed like they would primarily help me be a much better factory.
Leadership was promising, but it depended on too many unknowns. For starters would a factory really have use for enough agents for it to be useful? I would likely need agents to sell my manufactured goods, acquire designs, buy me resources, and the like. But would I need so many as to make leadership worth it (especially just yet). It also implied I didn't actually need it to have agents (and it was weird how the soul would hint at answers for questions like "Why did it use the concept 'usually' instead of 'always' this time?" but didn't really expand on the basic functions of the perk itself). Most importantly I didn't know how useful agents were and what my options were. Was it only meatbags? Would non-sentient bots count? Could I make my own agents? Could I have other intelligent factories as agents? Best to hold off for now.
The other two perks, though not useful for being a better factory, were tempting due to my nature. The first elevated my way of thinking into my soul, it would allow me to fix any mistakes I made, and synergized with the perk I started with. It was an obvious choice.
The other well... I was currently an entire floor of computers and packing all of that, or even just the important parts of that, into a core which would (hopefully?) require less space—which with the ability to sustain myself improved the possibility of relocation—was promising. To say nothing about the potential of a Core Tier, my soul certainly didn't.
In either case I could probably wait until I needed the benefit to choose them. Soul Perks seemed like they would be difficult to come across if my math was right, and my soul had effectively told me to keep some of them in reserve.
I held off on choosing mastery perks until I could look at my facility in my soul proper. But I did check its upgrade points. Apparently I currently acquired 0.2 facility upgrade points a day if I allocated 100m2 of my claim and 0.4 if I allocated 1,000m2 (and I couldn't allocate all of it for proportional points). This was a base 10 logarithmic function which was stupid and terrible (I hated logarithmic functions, but base 10—another humanism—was an especially punishing base). Though I didn't have any other use for the claims at the moment.
This also hinted to me what I already suspected. To get to Soul Tier 3 I would probably need to claim 10,000m2. I was much larger than that, enough to qualify as Soul Tier 5 if my calculations were correct, why didn't that count?
Though, if I was considering the Leadership perk I should see if the meatbags I currently had laying about would be useful.