Metamorphosis Alpha to Omega: Part 6: Deck 8: Factory Deck

Thick humidity, tropical heat, an overwhelming smell of living things, and a cacophony of sounds from birds, animals, and plants assault the senses of those who venture onto this deck. This is Warden's Factory Deck, an odd name for a space that seems far removed from industry.

The genesis of this equatorial-like biome occurred sometime during the madness after Warden was beset by the radiation that altered so much on the ship.Tropical flora and fauna that had been brought to the deck for recreational areas began to displace the neat lawns and small parks that had once been the norm. The shattered AI adjusted the climate to accommodate, nudging the heat and humidity higher and higher as the jungles and grasslands overran the entire deck.

Once, this deck had been the chief manufacturing section of Warden. Factories were regularly placed in pleasant industrial parkways. The workers who produced everything from holograph-chips to megadroids lived in a great, terraced city built against the forward bulkhead of Warden. It was an idyllic life, with the permanent residents here content and stimulated.

That all ended long ago. Chaos reigned after the radiation disaster, with mass death, subsequent plagues and mutations, and multiple wars and skirmishes laying waste to the population. The change in climate and ecosystem, which, while gradual, was still strangely speedy, overwhelmed the deck with a riotous spectrum of strange life. The factories were at first kept running at a limited capacity with robots and a dwindling handful of workers and their descendants. As living workers eventually became impossible to find, the factories eventually ground to a production halt.

A shard of the AI finally noticed its army of robots and androids was suffering attrition it could not replace. Sending in what mechanical forces it could muster, the AI reopened the factories. Not all, certainly, but the ones directly necessary for further android and robot production. Once production had resumed, the activity attracted the notice of remnants of the various warring factions that once dominated so much of the ship. One final battle was fought, with mutants and robots struggling claw-to-manipulator for control of production. It was nearly a Pyrrhic victory for the AI. The last vestiges of the mutant army were destroyed, but a scant score of robots and androids remained. It was a long, slow, and, if the AI and its mechanical minions had been able to feel physical sensation, painful rebuilding of forces. The AI shard had no access to the climate controls on the deck, so the climate was almost as implacable a foe as the mutants. The pervasive humidity and a strangely-mutated fungus that feeds on synthetic materials made simple maintenance on machines a constant meticulous necessity. But even with these obstacles, as well as the random mutant animals and plants that choose to prey on machines, the AI shard has been able to bring android and robot production back to a respectable level...and the AI did not skimp on the building of warbots needed to guard the factories.

Beyond the AI-controlled factories is a thronging wilderness, with dense rainforests and teeming savannas home to a rich array of life. Malevolent blur-lions prey upon the retromastodon herds on the grassy plains, while in the jungles the oranguborgs war with the vinelords and their robotic allies. The abandoned factories are now completely overgrown, appearing as green-covered hills on the landscape, but still possessed of artifacts of the past deep within their vine-covered walls. The once-gleaming city that had been home and haven to humans in the forgotten past is now a vast stepped garden on the surface, with the inner dwelling-places a shadowed maze of lost technological treasures and lurking death. Over the entire deck is a thick, suffocating atmosphere and a constantly encroaching layer of growing and grasping life.

Next: Part 7: Deck 8A: Warden's Engine Room