Author's Notes:

This is the final Intermission chapter. Like the rest, Cora tells the story and you don't need to read them. They just do character building.

Around the year 90, things started to get really bad in the wasteland. I’m talking huge groups of raiders, slavers, and Steel Rangers all trying to get you. The raiders and Rangers would try to kill you and the slavers, of course, would try to enslave you. Of course, these three groups weren’t the only things to worry about. There were also cannibals, power hungry individuals, ruthless scavengers, zebra remnants, groups of ghouls or robots, and alicorns started to show up at one point.

These groups alone are bad enough, but when you consider all of the pre war technology that began to once again circulate around the Wasteland thanks to scavengers and other groups rediscovering it, the groups also got a lot well armed. When Ratchet and I first left the lab, most weapons and armor amounted to glorified heaps of scrap. At year 90, laser and plasma weaponry was becoming a lot more common, as were explosives and heavy weapons. Armor also started to get better as well. All in all, hostile ponies got a lot more deadly.

For the next decade my friends and I managed to hold our own against these forces. Most of the time, we avoided them if we could. After all, there was no reason to needlessly fight. Soar would warn us about threats before we encountered them and if we ever got ambushed, our suits protected our inner components enough to keep us moving. That is just one of the benefits to being an AI in a hollow suit. Of course, Macro had it a bit rougher, as he still used a Mr. Handy body.

More than a few times, our bodies would be shot to hell and only Soar’s suit had a repair talisman in it. This left Macro and me to repair our own suits as they got damaged, and out in the field sometimes we had to make due with wonderglue covered sheets of metal. On one occasion, Soar and Macro were hit with a emp grenade. This caused a horrible problem for me as I was still outnumbered about ten to one.

Luckily, they only had the one grenade and I managed to take them out at the cost of a good portion of my body falling apart from bulletholes alone. I was able to drag myself over to Soar and Macro to initiate a restart of their systems. Once they were back up, we stopped our trip and Soar had to carry me back to the lab for repairs. After that, I made sure to upgrade us all with an auto-restart system incase of future emp attacks. The system wouldn’t kick in for a few minutes after the emp goes off, so we also had to institute a new policy of not standing near each other while fighting to make sure none of us went down at the same time.

Around the year 100, these sorts of incidents began to occur more frequently. We would find our bodies being damaged almost every other excursion into the Wasteland. We tried to do a number of things differently to avoid further damage. But whether we chose different routes, traveled only at night, or even tried to run at the first sight of anything that might be hostile, we kept running into trouble.

Because of this, in the year 106, we decided that it was time for a new addition to our group. We quite easily decided upon their body and designation, but the personality was the question. In the end, we just decided to adjust the traits randomly, even maxed out a few of the values. We were not sure what kind of personality we were going to get.

Of course, since we used a copy of Soar’s program, their base abilities would be the same. Decent accuracy and precision with their movements. This would be very important for what we had in mind. The only thing that concerned us, is whether or not this new AI would choose to stay with us or leave. Macro and Soar had prior knowledge before making their choice. Soar had my knowledge and Macro had been here for years already. But for a completely new AI with no prior knowledge, how would the offer seem?

We didn’t have to wait long to find out. When we activated H.A.L., we explained to him what he was, introduced ourselves, and told him the situation. He was pretty perceptive about it all, and took it all rather well. He was polite, like Macro, but Hal’s voice was deeper and carried more weight with it. Of course, we found during our first fight with Hal his personality had another aspect to it.

It turns out, while Hal was perfectly polite when in civilized company, he does a complete one-eighty when in combat. He swears, a lot, insults his enemies, and likes to play mind games. He was like Twinkle, in a way. But he was deeply sadistic and cruel to those who stood against him. Twinkle fought aggressively, but she was never this cruel to her enemies. Hal also really enjoyed explosions. He really, really liked them. Sometimes he would throw a grenade just to see it blow up when there wasn’t even anyone around.

Of course, all of this we found out later. But his body surely helped us to discover it. It was oddly, a perfect match for this other side of her personality. Hal’s name stands for Heavy Assault and Logistics. We needed someone with more firepower, Hal was our solution. I started by taking three of the remaining ranger suits and taking them apart. I then built off the frame of one of the suits that still had a working repair talisman.

Hal’s body was going to be big and weigh a lot. As a result, I started by reinforcing the legs and taking some of the pistons off the other suits and put them onto this one. Each leg has double the amount of pistons and servos as the regular suits. I hoped this would not only help stabilize him, but also keep him quick enough to keep up with us for the most part. But I wasn’t done there.

After the upgrades to the legs, I set about upgrading the basic armor to a sort of composite armor, like that in armored vehicles. This wouldn’t be nearly as good, but it was essentially an outer layer that was the original armor, then about an inch deeper into the armor, I made another layer of the metal armor for the suit. Between these two layers, I put sand, which is in abundance just outside the lab. The joints of the armor and the area where the internal magazines feed through the suit into the exterior guns are still weak, but that’s to be expected. Due to this armor scheme, his innerworkings are a lot closer together than in the other suits.

I didn’t stop there, however, I upgraded the exterior armor too. The legs each have reinforced plates along the length and additional parts of the armor that cover the joints in the knees. I also covered the shoulders with more armor to protect the joints. Since the armor didn’t need to be comfortable for an occupant, these upgrades will protect Hal a lot better. The body itself was also upgraded with more armored plates.

I made a number of other upgrades to the helmet and neck, but the most substantial of which is a custom piece that protects the join where the neck connects to the body. I molded some plates into two pieces, both half circles. One part, a larger part, I welded onto the front of the body armor, so it suck up in front of the neck. It leaves about an inch between the chin of the helmet and the top of this piece of armor. The other part of the armor I welded onto the back. This part fits into the front part but still allows the front piece to move. These two parts formed a sort of large collar around the neck to protect it.

The last parts of the armor I changed, was adding a few spikes on the tail and claws around each hoof. Given his weight, I don’t think he’ll be doing much charging at the enemy, but if they should get close to him, it is a good thing to have weapons to can fight them off. To finish off his armor, I painted most of his armor a dark amber, but the mane and tail parts a mustard yellow. In black, I painted his designation inside the collar along his neck armor.

The final thing I had to do was put the weapons on his armor. I picked out a grenade machinegun for his right side and on the left, I put Twinkle’s minigun that wasn’t destroyed in her fight with Umbra. I knew that Hal would do it justice. Once I was finished with his armor, I let him take it for a ride.

He was pleased with it. Hal said it was a bit slow, but it would suffice. Then we went out to test out the weapons and he seemed pleased. He especially enjoyed shooting the grenade machinegun to the point where I had to stop him before he wasted too much ammo. I had to explain how rare the round for that gun were and he let out a sigh before staring longingly at the blackened ground he shot at.

Hal claimed another portion of the living quarters and began living with us. He came in handy in our fights and we began to hold our own again. I think most of the time, the raiders were simply intimidated by his size and the look of his armor. I specifically went for intimidation when I added the extra armor. Hal made things easier for us.

But, even with Hal we sometimes found ourselves on the receiving end of a particularly ferocious attack. And even if there was another one of us, the Wasteland wasn’t getting any better. It was like things were constantly circling the drain, being dragged further and further down. The four of us weren’t equipped to deal with the wide scale chaos and horrors that the Wasteland had. We helped out if we came across some ponies in need, but there was never anything we could do on a large scale.

Instead, we mostly left that up to Ratchet, in the hopes that she would somehow be able to fix things and return Equestria to how it once was. But, she was just one pony, and like how adding another of us AI into the mix didn’t do much, adding Ratchet to the four of us didn’t accomplish much.

Ratchet was our guide and our hope for the future. But I didn’t want her exposed to any more of the Wasteland than she had to be. So I kept her frozen until she was needed. Once she was no longer needed, I would freeze her again. She also seemed ready to be frozen again, so I wasn’t really forcing her into it.

But, I will say it again. I am an AI. Macro, Soar, and Hal are AIs. We don’t get pony emotions. We have a simple grasp on the most simple of them. When it comes to complex emotions we can only imitate. There might be AI out there that are capable of understanding, but the four of us do not. I think because of this things inevitably went the route they did.