“I think it’s time to think about renovating,” Nyx told me as the two of us stared at the ocean of bears filling the garage.

  “To do that I’d need to bring the beavers back, and they’re busy reinforcing Sector Ten right now,” I grumbled.

  “You literally can’t even reach the matter reconfigurators right now. Every time a Kodiak or Fabricator comes out of the mass matter reconfigurator, they crush a couple of bears.”

  “But they recover afterwards!” I countered before looking at Nyx’s deadpan expression and slumping. “Alright, I admit it, I waited far too long to deal with this issue. I knew I was running out of space six months ago and received a temporary reprieve when I sent forces to Mars. Now that I’ve rebuilt my ground forces, it’s a problem again.”

  “So why haven’t you dealt with the issue?” Nyx asked.

  “Because I thought it would be a better use of the beaver’s time to reinforce and repair the local infrastructure. I don’t mind dealing with some mild overcrowding if that means that I can repair and secure some of the buildings around here.”

  Nyx raised an eyebrow. “Mild overcrowding?”

  “Alright, major overcrowding,” I sighed. “I honestly expected to see far more action in the last eight or nine months than I did. Going straight from the incursion to Seattle, then to Jasper, gave me the impression that I’d need a ton of bot production just to keep up with the losses. That obviously hasn’t been the case.”

  “Does that mean you’ve finally decided to shut down production?” Nyx asked.

  “Of course not! I still might need those bears!” I declared. “I just need more places to put them!”

  Nyx sighed, “Which brings us back to the renovations.”

  “Right.”

  I glanced around the cavernous garage area, stroking my chin. “Even though the central tower takes up a lot of space, there’s a lot of empty space along the slanted section of the garage. I don’t want to extend the existing floors, but we could have some loft-like areas.”

  “That should be fairly easy for the beavers to implement. I doubt they can get a full four floors around the outside of the frustum, but they could easily fit two or three,” Nyx agreed.

  “Since you’ve gotten me to agree to these renovations, I’d also like to investigate a dedicated landing area for the marsupial,” I said. “Since there’s no dedicated space for it right now, I’ve just had it float near the ceiling and used Kodiaks to load and unload it. It’s a real pain to deal with. There’s probably enough space to park two of them side by side if the area is set up properly.”

  “That probably can be arranged,” Nyx replied. “But you’ll have to discuss it with one of the beavers.”

  “Right… I guess I should call a couple of them back,” I grumbled.

  I didn’t want to abandon the sector revitalization project, so I only called about a dozen beavers back. They trudged in one by one, pushed through the crowd, and came to stand before me. Although they had a plush appearance, much like the bears, they also had a couple of heavy mechanical arms emerging from their backs. The facade made it look like they were attached to a heavy mechanical harness, but they were part of the bot.

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  “Alright, you lot,” I announced to the gathered beavers. “I need a bunch of storage lofts, both for bears and vehicles, along with a docking area for Marsupials. I’d like a couple different designs to look at as soon as possible. Any questions?”

  The plush beavers glanced at each other briefly, a surprisingly human gesture, before looking back at me and shaking their heads.

  “Alright, then off you go!” I declared.

  As soon as I said that, my augs lit up, receiving a barrage of messages.

  “What the shit?” I muttered as I flipped through the messages. “How did you all manage to come up with a different design in less than a second?”

  “You equipped all the beavers with engineering AI cores so they could design and reinforce buildings without assistance, remember?” Nyx said.

  “Yeah, I remember that, but I didn’t expect them to submit designs almost instantly,” I replied.

  “Class II AI cores can process information faster than any human-created computer network. The beavers already had the exact dimensions of the garage from when they were building the tower through the middle, so they just needed to run a few design algorithms to come up with designs,” Nyx explained.

  “Yeah, I kinda forgot about that. I’m so used to working with the bears, who need commands for every little thing, that I forget that some of the bots are super competent,” I muttered.

  “Maybe this is a sign that you should actually get an AI core for the bears. So you don’t have to command them to do every little thing.”

  “That would probably be a good idea if I had any points. The AI cores are by far the most expensive part of the bots,” I grumbled.

  As I was going through the plans, a thought came to mind, and I glanced over at the beavers. “Wait a minute, if you lot have AI cores, doesn’t that mean you should be able to carry on a conversation? Like the frogs.”

  The beavers glanced at each other again before the closest one nodded. “Yup.”

  “Then why haven’t I heard any of you speak before now?” I demanded.

  “Jawin don’t get the work done,” the same beaver replied dryly.

  I stared at it for several seconds before glancing over at Nyx.

  “They don’t like talking when there’s work to do,” the AI translated.

  “I guess that makes sense,” I mumbled, before returning to the plans.

  They were all fairly similar I guess there was only so much that you could do with an enclosed space in an already constructed structure. I immediately threw out the designs that had four additional floors, as I wanted a little extra space on the ground. I also threw out the designs that just had mixed garage and bear storage; they reminded me too much of the current situation.

  That only left me with three choices, and I immediately knew which one I wanted. It divided the garage area into sections. The southern area, which sat above the residence, would become bear storage, accessible through a series of staircases around the floor.

  The area in the west, above the matter reconfigurators, would become material storage. Getting all those raw materials off the garage floor would also help clear up some space.

  North would become the parking garage. The central area, above the garage door, would remain clear so the Kodiaks could rise directly up before sliding into parking built on both sides of the shaft.

  Finally, the east would have the docking platforms for Marsupials. According to the plans, I could fit two of the vehicles side by side. It would be a little tight, but it gave me options for the future.

  “How long will it take you to implement plan… GEP-017?” I asked, checking the plan’s labeling just to be sure I had the right one.

  “Coupa weeks, assuming we have the materials. Most are being shipped to Sector Eleven right now, and collection has been slow since you assigned those trucks to the reservoir,” the lead beaver explained.

  “Well, keep twenty percent back and get the bear storage up as fast as possible. The other sections aren’t as urgent. I just need to be able to move through the garage without tripping over a bear every two seconds.”

  The beavers all nodded. “Anything else, boss?”

  “Not right now, get to it,” I replied.

  The beavers instantly scattered, some scampering over towards the storage area, and a few others firing grappling hooks off their backs and swinging up to the roof so they could start marking off the new floors.

  “Industrious bastards,” I muttered, before turning back to Nyx. “So that’s finally getting handled. Do you have anything else I should know about?”

  “Only that your patrols still haven’t encountered any antithesis in the last twenty-four hours, even the teams you went out to sweep the wilderness.”

  “Still? What the fuck? And you have no idea why the antithesis would disappear like that?”

  “No. Antithesis activity tends to drop in an area when they’re expanding the hive network, but that’s temporary and ends in a massive increase in activity as the antithesis spread out and begin stripping the local area of all the available resources to support the growth. Command models could, in theory, force a hive to go into hiding, but not over such a wide area.”

  I groaned and rubbed my eyes with one hand. “You know what? Fuck this. I’m going to go talk to Angeline tomorrow. Maybe between the two of us we can track down some of these antithesis and figure out what’s going on.”

  “Tomorrow,” my AI repeated, with a nod.

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