The Mech Touch novel Chapter 922

Once Ves received his own private office and got settled in as the sub-department head, he started to explore his vastly greater authority. First, he gained the power to rearrange every mech related research project. He could close them, change their priority, increase or decrease their classification levels and appoint or remove any subordinates under his direction.

Right now, his subordinates mainly consisted of the virtual zombies composed of AI mech designers and researchers starved of processing power. Virtual Commander Cosit appropriated all of their processing power as they contributed nothing to the Starlight Megalodon compared to more vital AIs such as the maintenance crews who kept the aging ship running.

"Even if I divert processing power to them again, they’re under so many restrictions that they can’t do anything to help with the research."

The CFA relied heavily on automation and AIs to run their ships, and the Starlight Megalodon’s continued operations, if only barely, proved that there was merit to this belief. Yet even this AI-friendly organization never completely went as far as trusting them to the point of letting them take over.

Right now, Virtual Commander Cosit entrusted Ves with the Mech Research Sub-Department because he believed that humans wanted to rule over the Starlight Megalodon again.

That was an extremely mistaken assumption.

These stupid AIs completely disregarded implications of the enormous amount of time that had passed between the deaths of the last survivors and the arrival of new humans from the stars. To them, there wasn’t any appreciable difference between the two groups!

The AIs seem blind to the possibility of any ill intent among the newly-recruited humans. To these virtual officers who had been programmed to serve humans from the start, every CFA servicemember should be on the Starlight Megalodon’s side.

The only reason for AIs to be wary of humans was when they belonged to the opposite faction. The virtual officers inherited the factional strife of their human predecessors, and it was so acrimonious that this age-old conflict might even take precedence over their commandments not to harm humans!

"I have no interest in perpetuating this conflict. I just want to finish things up and get out of here."

If Ves wanted to, he could probably run all the way to the shuttle bay that stowed his personal CFA shuttle and skedaddle right away!

Yet he knew that Miss Calabast would not be pleased if he decided to be absent without leave.

"Someone as devious as her will likely have precautions in place."

Ves worried a bit about his personal shuttle. While the shuttle bay was heavily guarded and could not be accessed by anyone, Calabast did manage to become the head of the Intelligence Department.

"Feh." He huffed. Unlike Ves, she probably gained her position through cheating and hacking her way to the top. There was no way she could have earned the astronomical amount of merits required to successively be promoted to the rank of commander in the proper fashion.

Still, her rise illustrated that the Starlight Megalodon’s administration was full of holes. It just took some daring and ingenuity to take advantage of them. Her example stimulated Ves and caused him to be a bit more flexible in his plans to exploit his new position.

After all, why hold back when he never intended to hold this position permanently?

The Starlight Megalodon’s wellbeing didn’t concern him at all. Nor did he entertain any notions of abiding by the Common Oath he took upon his commission. Serving the CFA mattered extremely little to a mech designer like him. He had always leaned towards the MTA anyway.

As Ves dove into the administration, his expanded authority enabled him to view a listing of all the mech research projects that fell under his scope. Among the hundreds of projects that varied in scope and confidentiality, he noticed that their descriptions sounded more and more extreme as the latter increased.

"Looks like for all the principles and values the CFA espouses, they don’t practice what they preach." Ves huffed. To think he held the CFA on a high pedestal once as the saviors of human civilization. As Ves spent more time aboard the Starlight Megalodon, his rosy view of the power organization had taken more and more of a nosedive. "

A lot of their research on mechs entailed finding the best and most efficient way to counter them. This encompassed methods such as bombarding mech pilots with an enormous amount of gamma radiation in Project Radiance, and this was just the least of the extremes.

Project Mech Eater aimed to develop alloy-eating nanites that could break apart any mech, human or machine without a protective marker.

Project Magnetar entailed mixing various exotics together to synthesize an extreme magnetizing agent that would turn every mech and metallic object sprayed with it into powerful magnets that squashed into each other. _{freeweɓnovel.cøm}

Project Battle Casket took the cake. A joint project from both the Mech Research and Human Genetics Research Sub-Departments, it involved cultivating heavily-modified cloned human brains to act as organic AI pilots for mechs!

While many scientists, mech designer and organizations entertained such notions, they never really worked out due to the listlessness of the cloned brains.

As Ves read through the condensed logs of Project Battle Casket, the researchers bumped into the same problem. A complete human clone simply didn’t ’live’, in a sense, and the same applied to cloned human brains. They also found difficulty cultivating an artificial human brain that possessed the right genetic aptitude to pilot mechs.

So what was the solution the participating mech designers and specialists came up with? They decided to rip out brains from actual human mech pilots and force them to pilot mechs while being stuffed into jars!

"Absolute madness!"

All of these innovative solutions either involved enormous ethical breaches, massive collateral damage or a high risk of running out of control! If any of these methods went out of control, it wasn’t out of the question for them to destroy an entire city or planet!

Yet despite these concerns, the CFA back then went ahead and authorized these research projects anyway. Ves could only make one conclusion from this observation.

"The CFA must really have a complex relationship with the MTA."

According to Virtual Rear Admiral Ordoth, whose human predecessor should have been a highly-placed spy from the Five Scrolls Compact, the CFA and MTA made off with the Fire Scroll.

If true, Ves vaguely guessed that the two organizations probably wanted to keep the Sacred Scroll to themselves. However, there was only one Sacred Scroll to go around. This must have surely led to an awkward situation where the Big Two were forced to compromise and share the allegedly extra-galactic object.

Even if no irreconcilable conflicts broke out between the CFA and MTA during the Age of Mechs, the tensions between the two trans-galactic organizations never ceased. Ves speculated that even now the CFA were still cooking up ridiculously controversial research projects behind the scenes.

"Heh." He chuckled. "Even if that’s true, what does it concern me?"