Chapter 2: Where am I?
A large ball of crackling golden energy suddenly materialized in a desolate desert landscape. As it slowly dissipated it revealed a battered and scorched metal sphere sitting in a bowl of glass created by the energy melting the sand beneath it. A hatch opened on its side with an ominous hiss before revealing a young man with a wild shock of black hair, coughing and covered in soot. He tumbled out onto the sand and looked around with extreme interest. "Time. Location." He barked to seemingly no one.
[sensors damaged by unknown energy flare prior to temporal displacement]
[Alert: Engine has sustained critical damage in final stages of displacement, ejecting emergency supplies and downloading A.I. matrix into pilot's cybernetic storage.]
A few more hatches blew open forcefully and spewed packages across the sand just before shards of golden energy manifested around the sphere and it started to ripple and twist into itself, quickly turning into nothing more than a partially melted glob of scrap metal.
[Alert: insufficient information available, pilot's first priority is acquisition of precise temporal and geographic location. Second priority is establishing contact with local human culture and beginning Uplift.]
The young man stood and brushed some sand off of his skintight nanoweave suit. Despite its dark color it was designed to protect its wearer from a wide variety of environments and threats, cooling or heating as needed, and hardening against and dispersing any kinetic impacts it received. It and much of the supplies and equipment he had been sent with were developed by reverse engineering stolen alien tech. It was also the only existing prototype. He cursed as he surveyed the wreckage. It would also seem be the only equipment he had available to him, since most of the 'emergency' supplies were nutrient packs.
[Alert: Pilot also has access to two nanite cartridges ejected from the back of the Engine before meltdown.]
His mood picked up considerably, and he quickly circled the wreck to collect them. Nanites were what made things like his suit possible. They could also self replicate provided they had access to the right minerals, and he just so happened to be standing on a large amount of the right minerals. He wasted no time in linking them to his implants and dumping them into the sand. They didn't look like much to the naked eye, rather like the sand itself, only much darker in color. They poured out of their container like a fluid, sticking together instead of blowing away in the wind the way actual sand would. They spread across the sand at his feet like a dark stain, slowly getting lighter in color as they utilized the silica, quartz, and other trace minerals that made up the sand to create more of themselves.
He had no fear of what history called the Grey Goo Scenario, as they possessed numerous failsafes to prevent such an occurrence. The first and foremost being that they had a hardcoded limit dependent on the processing power of the hardware they were connected to. While his implants had a considerable amount of processing power, they would only permit him to control about two thousand pounds of them or so before new ones caused old ones to go inactive. If he wanted to expand that control he would have to construct dedicated processors and use them to relay commands. If they lost their connection to him or a relay they would go inactive.
As the nanites spread through the sand he collected the rest of his supplies, a stream of nanites peeling from the ground and forming into a backpack, which compressed itself down after he put all the nutrient packs in it. He shouldered it with ease before setting off towards the top of the nearest dune excitedly. His entire life had been spend confined in that sphere, and he couldn't wait to see the world he had been created to protect. When he got to the top and looked around he sat down heavily. All he could see in every direction was endless waves of sand.
[Location tentatively set to north-west quadrant of Sahara desert. Most expedient route to confirm location and locate human settlement is due north]
Although somewhat disappointed by only finding more sand, the young man jumped to his feet and slid down the side of the dune towards the wreck excitedly. It was still better than living in that thing with his humorless A.I. parent. His nanites had reduced the Engine to a pile of black sand. It flowed and wrapped around him, compressing down until he simply looked like he was wearing a more thickly padded version of his nanoweave suit. The excess flowed under his feet and solidified, shifting to secure his footing with every step he made. It also flowed across the sand, making each step closer to three or four steps.
After double checking and making sure he hadn't missed any supplies he set out to the north in search of whatever passed for society in this era. A few hours later the excitement of gliding across the sand, the wind blowing through his hair, had faded into a grueling slog across a never changing landscape under a blazing sun. The only change in scenery he had experienced was when a sandstorm hit and he was forced to take shelter in a hasty igloo like structure created from his nanites.
It wasn't until the sun was starting to set that he found something new, and it was very bad news. As he crested the top of a particularly large dune he saw a sparse forest that swiftly grew denser as it stretched into the distance. The sea of emerald green trees swaying in the breeze wasn't the bad news. The bad news was the group of five people he spotted running through the forest towards the desert being chased by what he would have identified as a hedgehog, if he didn't know for a fact that hedgehogs don't grow to six foot tall monsters or possess a mouthful of fangs.
[Error: observed fauna not recorded in Earth archeological database, probability of critical failure of Temporal Displacement Engine estimated at 48.84%]
One of the fleeing humans turned to face the monster for a moment, shouting an unintelligible word and making a bizarre hand gesture at it. He watched in astonishment as a bolt of fire erupted into existence and splashed across the thing's snout without much effect. The man resumed running, but it was growing obvious that they weren't going to be able to escape. That made the choice easy for the young man watching them. His responsibility was to guide and protect mankind, and despite the anomalies he intended to do precisely that.
[Error: anomalous energy surge detected, source unknown. Probability of critical failure of T.D.E. elevated to 89.74%]
He ignored the A.I., sliding down the side of the dune at a rather unsafe speed in an effort to intercept the group before the creature got them. Luckily they saw him and turned to run towards him. As the group surged past him he skidded to a stop, a spray of nanite infused sand pouring off of him and shaping itself into a hardened pillar that tapered to a molecularly sharp point. He finished just in time, the man that had thrown the anomalous fire ducking past the spike as the creature lunged to sink its fangs into him, causing it to impale itself instead. He had the nanites flow towards the end of the spike and extend into perpendicular spikes near the tip, securing the creature and causing more internal damage.
He watched with a morbid fascination as it struggled to free itself, even somehow spraying its spiky fur at its surroundings like wickedly barbed darts or arrows. Fortunately none of its fur was at the right angle to hit the people in front of it. When it finally breathed its last he turned to face the people he had saved. They were dressed in rags, worn and exhausted looking, and all except the fire-thrower was prostrating themselves on the ground at his feet. The fire-thrower had bowed deeply to him and was holding it.
The spike collapsed into sand with a thought and his nanites flowed free of the corpse. "Hello!" He said with a bright cheery smile. "My name is Three! Mind telling me where I am?"
The fire-thrower craned his neck awkwardly to look at him without exiting his bow and said something Three didn't understand. The true marvel was that his A.I. didn't understand either, and it possessed a comprehensive database of every known human language throughout known history. Three frowned, he would need more samples in order to construct a translation algorithm. Noticing the panic his frown sparked in the man he smiled again and waved for the man to stop bowing. Which did absolutely nothing, because his gestures meant nothing to these people.
He stepped closer to the man and gently pushed upwards on his shoulder until he was standing upright again, then crouched to pull the nearest person to their feet. It turned out to be a woman around his age that would probably be considered beautiful under better circumstances, but they all reeked of sweat and were covered in dirt and torn bits of foliage which drastically reduced their appeal. He waved for them all to stand again before glancing at the sky and frowning again. His nanites started to construct a thick wall from the quartz in the sand. With strange monsters infesting the forest he wanted to have a sturdy shelter to take refuge in for the night. His nanites were sustained by either solar energy or thermal energy, provided it didn't exceed their melting point, and most deserts had an abundance of neither at night.
While the crystalline wall quietly grew around them he resorted to a game of improvised charades in an effort to communicate with them and get them talking so he could establish a baseline for the language, pointing at things and asking its name before repeating back whatever they said. They got both excited and skittish again when they noticed the walls he was building, but calmed quickly enough and several went to cut slabs from the dead creature not far away and collect wood for a fire. They roasted a great deal of the meat, dragging the remains of the corpse farther into the forest and covering the blood trail with sand to mask where it had died a bit. As darkness fell over their little camp Three was ecstatic, these were actual people!
He could hardly stop smiling and trying to learn their language as they ate, leaning heavily on his cybernetic implants to accelerate the process. The only thing that put a damper on his good mood was when the moons rose.
[Error: celestial anomaly detected. Starscape confirms temporal location: early bronze age Earth. Presence of additional celestial body inconsistent with possible outcomes of temporal backlash]
[Hypothesis: unknown energy burst prior to displacement destabilized dimensional anchors. Pilot displaced across time and dimension. Assessing potential relevance to primary mission. Encounter with human life renders dimensional displacement irrelevant. Primary mission re-established. Population unstable due to insufficient gene pool. Seek out greater population and initiate Uplift]
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