The Engineer didn't reach for a rifle. He reached for his blueprint book.
Engineer 041 woke to the taste of copper and the smell of burning coal. The sky was the color of a bruised plum, thick with the heavy particulate of automated progress. Around him, the chorus of the factory played its industrial symphony.
With a swipe of his hand, a ghost image of a laser turret wall materialized in the dirt. Instantly, construction robots swarmed from his personal port [2]. They buzzed like angry steel bees, carrying components and welding them into reality in a shower of white-hot sparks. Factorio.v1.1.72-GOG.zip
This is a short story based on the technical and atmospheric essence of [2].
He heard them before he saw them. The skittering of chitinous legs on stone. The biters were coming, drawn to the very scent of his progress [2]. The Engineer didn't reach for a rifle
He walked the line. He loved the split-second precision of the fast inserters [2]. Their blue mechanical arms swung in perfect, neurotic arcs, plucking green circuits from one belt and placing them onto another with the absolute certainty of mathematics [2]. There was no waste here. There was only the beautiful, terrifying geometry of expansion.
To the north, the rhythmic, heavy thump of electric mining drills bit into the crust of a vast iron patch [2]. They did not tire. They did not complain. They simply chewed the earth and spat out raw ore onto yellow conveyor belts that flowed like rivers of metal [2]. The sky was the color of a bruised
A second later, the darkness was illuminated by bright red beams of concentrated light. The biters melted into the soil, screaming in a frequency that was ignored by the machines.