harleyscars Chapter 54 Under the Dome
Chapter 54 Under the Dome
936.M41, Garros.
The finished product buffer area of the servant production line is never empty. New servants come off the line one after another, their six-legged, two-legged, or tracked chassis rolling over the floor of the passageway, their optical lenses reflecting a dark red glow in the low-light illumination. They are diverted under the command of the Thinker array—to the dome construction site, to the underground pipelines, to the storage area, and to the newly excavated space.
The servo robots are no longer limited to general-purpose engineering types. Production line molds can be quickly switched according to demand, and the infusion of a new wet component core protocol takes only minutes. Hundreds of meters above the dome construction site, the plasma nozzles of flying servo robots leave blue trails as hooks lift heavy adamantium trusses from the ground to the installation station. In the pipe mezzanine, serpentine servo robots silently traverse the pipe corridors, endoscopic cameras scanning every weld seam. At the workbench of the servo component casting unit, precision servo robots, with their multi-fingered claws, meticulously solder tiny electronic components onto circuit boards. There are also transport servo robots stacking goods in the warehouse, traction servo robots pulling flatbed carts on tracks, and guard servo robots patrolling the perimeter of the production line cluster. Each type is customized for a specific job and is ready to be used immediately upon production.
The Thinker Array operates silently within the underground computing hub. Its task queue is no longer simply about "producing a certain number of engineering servitors." It needs to predict future welder shortages based on the progress of the dome construction site, calculate the required number of serpentine servitors based on the frequency of pipeline inspections, and determine the production priority of precision servitors based on the product type switching of the servitor parts casting unit. The array learns autonomously from the data stream, constantly adjusting the mold configuration and capacity allocation of the production line.
But the Thinker Array has its limitations. It processes data quickly and executes instructions accurately, but it stops when it encounters ambiguous commands. The inventory of ceramic steel plates in the southern section of the dome construction site is running low, and the warehouse reserves are also dwindling—the array reports the inventory data, but it doesn't proactively decide whether to allocate inventory or switch molds to increase production. The electrode wear of the casting unit for the third machine servant on the production line has reached the threshold, and the precision machine servant has already replaced the electrode—the array records the replacement time and predicts the next replacement cycle, but it doesn't determine whether the old electrode should be recycled or scrapped. Every piece of information is pushed to Enpu's terminal. He reviews it, makes decisions, and issues instructions. The faster the dome's progress, the more machines there are, and the more complex the production line, the more information is pushed to the terminal. He's not giving orders; he's patching up the gaps. And patching up the gaps is taking up more and more of his time.
He needed a Thinker Array capable of autonomous decision-making. Not data processing, but understanding intent; not executing commands, but proactive judgment. He transplanted the decision-making framework of the Dead Core into the Thinker Array's architecture and wrote the wet component cultivation plan from the Andros Project into the database. The first batch of thought-injected wet component cores had been cultivating in nutrient tanks for several weeks and would mature soon. Tens of thousands of brains, possessing complete thinking abilities but lacking self-awareness, would undergo a qualitative leap in the Thinker Array's decision-making capabilities once connected to the data bus. At that time, material allocation at the dome construction site, production line capacity distribution, and fault priority judgment would no longer require his terminal to vibrate. But not now. Right now, those tens of thousands of cultivated brains were still slowly growing in the nutrient solution, the faint light of the data infusion electrodes flickering in the darkness. He could only continue to open the list on the terminal and process it item by item.
A group of engineering sergeants were dispatched to excavate new underground spaces. Their digging claws stripped away rubble from the rock strata, and tractors hauled the excavated soil away. They could handle most rock formations—basalt, granite, gneiss—within their operational range. But some geological structures were beyond their capabilities. Fault fracture zones, high-stress areas, karst development sections—the Thinker Array's geological analysis module would predict the collapse risk in these areas and then send a request to Enpu's terminal: he needed to handle it on-site.
He stood before the newly excavated tunnel, the field unfolding before him. Unstable rock strata, under the decomposition command, transformed into an atomic cloud. An adamantine framework grew from the void, embedding itself deep within the rock, firmly locking the loose rock fragments. Cracks were filled with grouting material, and groundwater was guided to drainage holes. Engineering automatons would construct according to the parameters marked on the blueprints, but they wouldn't handle suddenly exposed fracture zones during excavation. Enpu would. Wherever he passed, the rock strata were already firmly locked by the adamantine framework. This wasn't due to the automatons' incompetence; it was because geological exploration could never be 100% accurate. The true state of the rock strata underground could only be known by digging. The automatons dug, he arrived, the field covered, decomposed, reshaped, and reinforced. Completed in one go.
The lifting platform has been built and put into use. Two vertical tunnels, each 100 meters in diameter, extend from the surface inside the dome to the logistics warehouse platform deep underground. Heavy-duty carriages carrying excavated waste rise from underground along guide rails with a refined gold frame, dump it in designated areas, and return empty. Enpu doesn't need to worry about waste transportation; the Thinker array dispatches transport vehicles to load the waste into the carriages and transport it along pre-set logistics routes. The warehouse platform is also operational, with all the lights on, the tracks laid, and gantry cranes moving back and forth. Profiles are lifted from the shelves in the raw material storage area, loaded into the lifting platform carriages, and transported to the dome construction site. Castings are transported from the production line cluster's access channels, sorted, temporarily stored, and reloaded on the warehouse platform before being transported to where they are needed. The lifting platform and the warehouse platform are his preparations for the future, and also the current logistics arteries. Without them, the excavated waste would pile up like mountains, the profiles in the raw material storage area couldn't be delivered, and the progress of the dome construction site would be stalled.
He can currently handle the raw material issue. The dome construction site consumes hundreds of thousands of tons of profiles daily. He can use his site management system to traverse an area, and large quantities of profiles can be formed and neatly stacked in a very short time. It's not a matter of efficiency, but a matter of time—hundreds of thousands of tons are easy for him, but in the future, millions or tens of millions of tons per day will no longer be possible to rely on him alone. With each increase in scale, the time he spends on this will double, and he only has so much time. The real bottleneck isn't ordinary ceramic steel and PVC, but things that the machine production lines can't manufacture themselves. Rare materials. That's where he should focus his time. It's not about worrying about the inventory of ceramic steel plates every day, but about transforming the atomic reserves in the warehouse into high-end components and core equipment, and of course, rare raw materials like refined gold and subspace alloys.
The terminal vibrated. The inventory of ceramic steel plates in the southern area of the dome construction site was running low. He pulled up the warehouse data; the reserve area also had very few plates left. He'd take some time today to sculpt a batch. He opened the blueprint, retrieved atoms from the warehouse, and condensed them one by one, stacking them on the shelves in the reserve area. He also casually sculpted a few refined gold frame nodes, which were needed for the expansion of the underground computing hub, as the servant production line couldn't manufacture them.
He straightened up, gazing at the row of cold white lights on the dome of the central storage platform. Once Garros' industrial system was fully operational—the furnace complex ignited, the machine servant production lines self-replicating, and the raw material supply chain in a closed loop—he could be completely freed from these tedious foundational tasks. At that point, even rare materials like adamantite and subspace alloys could be sourced externally. Garros' transport fleet would extend its routes to the Empire's more distant foundry worlds, exchanging Garros' industrial products for high-end materials. He would no longer need to personally forge every adamantite node; he could simply sit in his private workshop, working out blueprints and refining the architecture. That was a long way off, but the direction was already set.
Then he closed his eyes, his consciousness withdrawing from the body like a receding tide, instantly surging into Cohen's body through a higher-dimensional anchor. The Black Pearl was still navigating in subspace, purple light swirling outside the portholes. As his consciousness withdrew...
The errand boys at Garros continued digging, welding, and stacking. The Thinker array operated silently in the central computing hub, coordinating production line capacity allocation, material distribution across the dome construction site, the gantry cranes on the central warehouse platform, and the elevator cars on the lifting platform. The wet cores in the incubation tanks continued to grow slowly, the faint light from the data infusion electrodes flickering in the darkness.