Nature Of The Beast

After reading Patrick's review and discovery of the General Nakshi, I realized that how I had rebuilt Quanta from the combination of a sentient AI modeled after a childhood lover and the remains of an ancient Nakshi meant I had unwittingly recreated a similar configuration artificially.  I told her this, and my Nakshi said we humans are a bit slow to catch on but that if I paid attention to context more in battle, that I could have deduced it from the position she takes directing my Skriag Claymore and his "brother" Giga Rex.  This was unusually snippy coming from her and she'd offered a bit of an apology.  I decided this artificial version of the General Nakshi should be referred to as its own class of "subcommander" since they can direct other units on the field with some autonomy but still require a certain amount of direction from the pilot.

Then again, I always did have somewhat of a weird relationship to my machines.  That comes from having them run collectively using disembodied brains that communicate to each other wirelessly.  They are learning machines, yes, these Synthmen but they have a bit of a hard time making decisions on their own and prefer teamwork to taking individual action.  The Beast mecha with their stronger more dominant personalities seem to make natural leaders for these semi-sentient makes, and that's fine by me.  Except for when my dinosaur BFM mecha try to take a stab at it with their comparatively dimmer mental faculties.  My Aspis likes running in the front line. It does not know squat about directing the rear line of a formation from the front.  Remember, most dinosaurs in prehistoric times tended to have brains roughly the size of a walnut, and a few had secondary "hind brains" to direct motion since apparently they lacked sufficient processing power to handle it all using one unit.

Quanta and I bond sometimes in a way the other beast mecha and I can't. She is a dispatcher which is something I myself am not so good at, but we have an overlapping interest in design. I'm not sure how much of that is the neurology of a Nakshi, if they are/were originally of a creative bent versus if it came about through a quirk in the specific process of integrating her with the AI due to her Beast Mecha brain's physiology in fusion, but she seems to enjoy sharing with me ideas on load outs for some of the other mecha in my (our) formation based on her observations serving with them in the field. Sometimes these are useful. Other times they are silly and I suppose she might be joking around.

The other Beast Mecha talk strategy, testing their upper limits and getting stronger, but Quanta seems bored with this at times and why shouldn't she be? She's much faster than her two battle brothers.  They all have an enormous intellect but manifest it in different ways.

Submitted by Mycobacter#712744