Chapter 7

Somehow I must have managed to turn off the light, because I woke up in the same darkness as before. I felt much better, and the headache was gone.

When I checked the time it was just before 4:00 in the morning. I had slept nearly 10 hours! I must have been at the end of my capabilities to sleep that long.

Well, at least I got the opportunity to rest. While I made myself a breakfast I looked over the building plans. It was a large five story building with an additional two story basement. It had a large atrium with, surprisingly an Olympic sized pool. Oh, and apparently it had some sort of glass roof that could be closed to make the atrium a winter garden, and the pool into an indoor pool.

It was made out of carbonweave plascrete with a diamond coating, but it seems the coating has been neglected over the last few years. While eating I dug deeper into the plans.

The doors where all out of multilayer carbon composite and with a multilevel lock system. It would be easier to go through the walls, and these were as hard as 20 meters of old fashioned prestressed reinforced concrete. Nope, one would need a bunker buster to get in here. I also found that the atrium cover was made of several layers of diamond-graphene composite with nanotube weave for extra strength. It filtered out UV radiation and could be turned opaque at any time.

It was still the weak point of the building, but it favorably compared to battleship armor.

Whoever designed this house wanted to be sure nothing could come in uninvited.

And that did not mention the weapon emplacements. My cursory inspection of the active defenses disclosed the true age of the building. Not one of the weapons was younger than 30 years old. So here we had a point we would have to work on. Quickly.

The main entrance was on the south side of the building, and had what appeared to be a significant parking space. The southern wing had a reception area, and what seemed to be several offices. In the second floor we had a large room, seemingly a conference room, but at this moment it was mostly empty. The offices got bigger the higher the floor number.

The west wing housed the garage, a few workshops, the storage area and the armory, which was located on the inside corner to the south wing. The upper floors were as far as I could discern initially used as technological labs. Now it housed mostly a few cages and random junk.

The east wing was where the slavers placed their operation. The big lab on the ground floor where we were collared and that now housed Frankel and his friends, and the storage room they placed their freshly collared slaves. One floor up we had the group area, with a lounge, a game room, a large kitchen and the mess hall. The other floors above had 10 rooms each with an ensuite bathroom.

My room, and I guessed the rooms of the others, was directly above the group area. Most of the rooms still had the clutter of the former inhabitants. I discovered eight small prison-cell-like structures marked as slave quarters, and immediately a pang of guilt hit me. I would have to free the slaves, yesterday, if not sooner. Damn, so much to do.

The north wing was interesting. The bottom two floors were combined into big rooms. Above that it contained several multi-room suites, with a private kitchen, a private living room and a bigger bathroom each.

The two at the top floor had balconies, private studies and three bedrooms each. Clearly they were intended for the bosses of whatever was housed in this building.

And it was completely unused. Just junk and clutter, but no sign of habitation.

The basement housed much of the technical areas. Wow, we had our own water treatment plant? With our own well? Strange. Our energy came from a host of solar panels. At least a trickle came from them, as it looked like they were degraded quite a bit, and a pair of Wilton GBx33 fusactors.

Wiltons had a relative good reputation, but from the records I could see that they had not been serviced for 18 years. That was not really good. Also they were over 30 years old. I send the cluster the order to look into replacement fusactors in the region. The computer room was a hodgepodge of obsolete, obsolescent, kluge and modern equipment. It would all have to be replaced. The other technical areas brought no surprises. We had further storage rooms, and below the north wing, we had a series of empty large rooms. I decided then and there that these would be where I would place my NADA. I was contemplating building a second one, but that had time.

I looked into my order for the bots and androids, and found them still crated outside of the cargo dock. It seems nobody got the notification. Well, we could take care of it when the others were awake.

Then I began to reprogram the building systems. First, of course the security system. I decided to leave my person as top priority, but excluded the others from any reaction unless my life was immediately endangered. I declared them secondary priority only behind my protection. Then I dialed it back to normal conditions. No more accidental shootings.

Then I started to investigate the history of the building, the territory and the immediate area.

The building history was ... interesting, if you want to call it so. Thirty years ago this was the headquarter of Segden Inc. They were an innovative corporation specialized in AI systems and industrial bots, in their time.