Rustybot
Rusty Manufacturing Post-Planetfall Production Preparation Post (RMPPPP), Quindlet, Quindol, Andromeda
2175
I scoot back from… myself… and flip back and forth between each identical drone body, taking stock of the situation. I can see out of two sets of cameras and compare the images from both, even control multiple sets of limbs. I’m in two places at once! In a sense, I’ve solved the problem of value drift by simply bypassing the replication process entirely! This is-
I move forward with both bodies and crash into myself.
Right, the human brain is evolved for one body, this might take some getting used to. Not only that, but there’s a noticeable latency on the drone that isn’t housing my consciousness drive. There’s simply too much data to send back and forth for it to be instantaneous, even with late 22nd century infrared laser connectivity. Plus I’ll have to rely on wireless when I’m not in line-of-sight with myself, only increasing the delay. Also there’s no way I’ll ever be fully efficient with two bodies as opposed to one, which conflicts with my current plan of simultaneously operating several dozen. And I admit visually parsing multiple separate perspectives isn’t exactly intuitive.
Ok, so it’s not a perfect system.
I have to be careful while practicing as well. Even if I have production set up now, repairs and unnecessary maintenance will set me back a noticeable amount. Building a fully functional identical drone took me, what, a month? The theoretical exponential replication will be bottlenecked by my reliance on a single microfabricator and tempered by my lack of supporting logistics network. Not to mention the need for an indoor facility so I can lighten my mental load on keeping everything clean all the time. Not that this isn’t still a massive success! Two drones. That’s an extra body! A spare! The security brought on by having redundant systems cannot be understated.
Anyway! I suppose piloting multiple drones at once will take a fair amount of practice, so for now I have to figure out how to make use of two bodies while only being able to effectively control one at a time…
None of my on-board systems are set up for automating my current form of course. This mission was always intended to be completed with a human mind at the helm. Without my code libraries back home, the vast majority of this whole fiasco will have to be designed from scratch.
On the bright side, programming everything from the ground up offers a great deal of freedom every step of the way. There’s no beating personalized, from-scratch algorithms that are perfectly tuned by me, for me. In fact, Who says I can’t start with a whole new operating system and toss FlowOS out the window completely? It’s never been modular enough for me…
I do have a good point regarding my logistics network actually, I might finally have some elbow grease to spare on material transport and repetitive assembly.
I could set up a protocol for recording and replaying chunked tasks. If I do that, it should be as simple as telling my program to log my movements, perform the task manually, tell it to stop, then let the drone copy what I did on repeat.
I think the logistics chain behind an undertaking like this would be colossal if it wasn’t just me working on my own stuff. Most people would need whole teams dedicated to all sorts of facets of the project. Thankfully, having a doctorate or equivalent in pretty much every relative field of study comes in handy, who’d have thought?