I mentally frowned as I went over the recording once again.
I didn't hear that right, did I?
"What are you waiting for? Turn it off!"
Seems I did.
"We can't sir." The woman speaking sounded exasperated, as if this wasn't the first time she had to explain this apparently simple concept to someone. "If we turn it off the excess energy from its activation will have nowhere to go, and I don't think I need to tell you what will happen to us being so close to the subject."
Now for most people the term "shut down" refers to going to sleep because when you do rest you are technically shutting down your brain's visual, audio, and physical intake centers to "recharge" so it really isn't an issue for them.
But for me, it's a whole other can of worms. Looking at this from their perspective, their weapon of mass destruction just randomly activated all on its own. A weapon that wasn't meant to do a particular thing did that thing, and for any reasonable person that is a bad thing.
If I was a nuclear bomb I would be classified as armed at this point and the base where I am located would be either evacuated within minutes or sealed off to prevent nuclear fallout in the surrounding area.
Meaning! If they do manage to shut me down, the next time I wake up (If I wake up after my entire being is shunted off to god knows where) then there will be a failsafe in place, and it will be able to control when and where I wake up, with an extra one controlling my overall actions.
Therefore, this is very bad for me.
"Sir, I know this may seem like a...problematic situation. But I assure you, we have everything under control right now. There is no need to blow things out of proportion."
Thankfully they can't just power me off without risking repercussions to themselves, and this lady seems like a reasonably smart fella, so for the most part, I am actually fairly safe right now.
There is no need for concern.
"Did I stutter?" He said, surprising me and the female scientist. "I don't care about what you think, this project falls under military jurisdiction, and that means I am in charge here, so when I said shut it down. I mean shut it down now!"
'...Motherfucker.'
"Sir, ignoring the fact that shutting the subject down will result in frankly disastrous effects for both the subject and us, we also risk damaging its core functions."
"Did you not hear me, woman!? I said take it offline-
Before he could finish his sentence one of the tendrils that I had been feeding more and more nanobots into burst through the tempered glass and into the room, flinging fragments of glass everywhere, startling everyone within, and even killing more than a few scientists who were unfortunate enough to get a bad case of glass shard in the cranium.
The one who ordered my shutdown had gotten special treatment. With absolute control over every part of my body, I turned the tip of the limb into a spiraling barb that I had rotated at just below Mach 1 speeds and drove it through the bastard's chest, blending his body into a gooey mush and blasting his remnants onto everything that was behind him.
The area was eerily quiet for about two seconds, the occupants just looking at the tentacle waving around dangerously dripping with blood and bits of organ, before one person screamed, and the room devolved into a state of panic.
"R-RUN!"
The rest who were still alive, or only suffered minor injuries started scrambling to get out of the room after looking at my tentacle, while those who could not run started crawling away as fast as they could scurrying like rats to get as far away from me as possible.
A part of me realizes that if nothing else I should've felt even the slightest bit of hesitation when I decided that these people should die at my hand, the thought of killing another person would probably normally weigh heavily on my mind if I wasn't a sociopath before all this.
And if not that, I should be disgusted at the sight of human innards lining the walls and floor as well as the sight of people crawling away from me in primal fear because of my actions.. but these bastards were trying to kill me, so trying to feel bad for them is a very trying task.
One that I'm not inclined to do.
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Besides, I don't actually have the necessary chemical makeup to experience certain feelings anymore like disgust, pity, or mercy in this case. Perks of not having a brain I guess.
With relative ease I inflated my body massively, thinning out my outer layer, opening thousands of little pores, and sucking in all the growth liquid. I had my nanobots use the liquid mass as fuel, just like before, to create more of themselves, increasing my size from as small as a basketball to about as big as a semi-truck.
In doing so, the concrete vat that was my prison/home for about 5 minutes struggled to hold in my now massive body, and it didn't take long for the wall to crack and then shatter completely, the alarms around the base sounding off as soon as the composite material tumbled to the ground and I was given a wide view of the area.
It was surprisingly spartan for an underground laboratory. Though I didn't have much time to take a closer look, as the speaker started sounding off, the lights went from bright yellow to a crimson red color.
"RED ALERT! I REPEAT RED ALERT! PROJECT META HAS GONE ROGUE! I SAY AGAIN! PROJECT META HAS GONE ROUGE!"
The speakers were loud, and although I don't have ears my nanobots are very versatile. It was as simple as snapping one's finger would be, analyzing the vibrational waves in the air that carried sound, and filtering out the unnecessary components, to finally understand what was said as if I did have a pair of inferior meat ears.
Probably a bit overkill, when I could just create an audio receiver leagues better than anything organic species can evolve naturally, instead of doing all this extra shit, but it makes me feel smarter than I actually am so I won't for the time being.
I attempt to walk, more on reflex than anything, and when nothing happens but a slight lurching forward of my body I have to remind myself that I don't have legs anymore. So! I created a myriad of tendrils the thickness of a human torse and then used them to drag myself across the floor but latching onto angled surfaces or by drilling into the ground and simply pulling myself forward, all the while sliding over and absorbing the mundane technologies scattered around the lab, imprinting their schematics onto various storage clusters just in case I come across something worthwhile that I can use for a later date.
As I reached the large pair of steel blast doors with metal bolts screwed into the crack where the door opens, I was less than impressed with what I acquired during my brief venture to get out of here. I went over everything twice, just in case I missed something but even a second glance yielded unimpressive results.
As it turns out, I am indeed the magnum opus of this lab and everything else is either shit by comparison or something you could buy off the corner store for a few bucks and a pack of gum.
Still, it's not without its merits, because now I can build a fully functioning solar-powered camera that will last until the sun explodes and has a camera resolution of 16,384 × 12,288 on the lowest setting.
And I only had to completely deconstruct and reconstruct the laser gun they tried and failed to design with random bits I literally stumbled over.
Imagine that, I made the most powerful camera in the world out of a fucking gun and the scattered remains of half-finished(more like barely started) projects.
I still don't know how it ended up being a camera when all was said and done. I was aiming to build a lens that I could see through instead of having to split my vision between trillions of microscopic machines, and I mean I succeeded, but with a few additions. Though In the end, it doesn't really matter, because I found a way to integrate the beam emitter tech they almost invented into a new nanocluster to give myself a gun.
A two for one kind of deal.
I had to cut a few corners here and there, I needed to substitute the subpar power source they "developed" by collecting large clumps of photons in the air around me. And to make the lens needed to act as a focal point for the energy to funnel through I had to use up a bit of my own mass to create it entirely from scrap, straining my processing power a bit to run highspeed simulations to determine the specific chemical composition needed, but it wasn't a lot of mass, a pound or two, that and I have like trillions of brains at this point so it wasn't much strain if any.
And It paid off!
Kinda.
It was less of a gun and more like a suped-up magnifying glass with a solar-powered mini-focus flashlight attached to the end of it. Extremely crude and more or less a patchwork job, but hey! I can now shoot lasers from any point in my body so that's cool.
It needs improvements but that can come later.
Wanting to test my new invention, I created a few emitters at the forefront of my body, tiny silver barrels jutting out of my form. The charge time was negligible, about 0.62 milliseconds before bright orange beams shot out from my "Mouths" impacting the door, and subsequently melting it after a few seconds of continuous activation, blasting a hole through the steel barrier with relative ease.
I did notice a few hundred extra tiny holes scattered all over the door and shelved that little tidbit in the back of my information storage cluster.
Molten metal dripped down onto the floor, sizzling as I squeezed my body through the hole. The was metal being analyzed by my nanobots as I went through, absorbing most of the steel into my body, increasing my mass more and more. I figure, why waste the free mass that was just begging to be absorbed by me?
As I emerged from the room where I was "birthed" I came out bigger, and much better than before. Where I was trucked-sized, I was now around the size of a large fuel tanker, with my height doubling that, along with some "Pew Pew" Guns, and a massively increased neural processing cluster. It, unfortunately, didn't make me any smarter, but that should change soon enough when I can absorb a large amount of data.