Rusty Manufacturing was founded by Rustybot in the year 2172 as a way to slip through a legal loophole and regain communication with Earth following his termination from Flow two years prior.
Rusty Manufacturing is notable for its extragalactic nature, being the first and only human corporation based in Andromeda. It is also the only known company currently in operation to have zero employees.
In the modern day, Rusty Manufacturing focuses on the advancement of spaceborn automation and laser technology.
Notable Technology
Drones
A Drone is any Rusty Manufacturing unit capable of being controlled by a Pilot. Drones range from Bitbots to Alpha Drones and can have a wide variety of functionality, but are primarily used for the automation of manual labor.
A Rusty Drone does not house the Pilot’s consciousness on board. Instead, the Pilot controls its body through QEC from the comfort of Dataspace.
Alpha Drones
Alpha Drones are equipped with multiple Underspace Harvester Cores, Microfabricators, and countless weapon systems. These drones are capable of self repair and indefinite uptime. Pilots in these units usually lead exploration missions and expansion initiatives by using their capabilities to perform the duties of a Von Neumann Probe.
The Prime Unit
While a Prime Unit is often referred to as a separate type of drone, this distinction is only a form of utility to denote which Alpha Drone is currently being inhabited by Rustybot. There is no physical change in the structure of the drone.
Beta Drones
Beta Drones are often assigned to an individual production facility. They have limited combat capabilities but extensive sensor suites.
Gamma Drones
Gamma Drones are universal manual labor machines. Not much more than a hull and motors. Often a few dozen exist under each Beta.
Bitbots
Bitbots are a subset of Rusty Drone that consist of a hover thruster, display screen, and interaction beam array. They often act as autonomous power tools or surveillance units. The primary purpose of a Bitbot is to perform autonomous maintenance, especially in small or otherwise hard to reach places. Unlike the majority of Rusty Manufacturing robotics, Bitbots are true A.I., meaning they are synthetic neural networks and not a copy of an uploaded human mind.
Underspace Harvester Cores
Underspace Harvester Cores (UHCs) were perhaps the most critical step in Rusty Manufacturing’s extragalactic resurgence. Due to The Primary Timeline’s near-impermeable lower membrane, Underspace was not a
Digital Systems
Pilots
A Rusty Pilot is a simulated individual consciousness created by running Rustybot’s personality composition in a state of controlled superposition on a quantum computer. Early in his industrialization of Quindlet, he tried to mitigate the fact that working alone while attempting to expand production would lead to diminishing returns. While attempting to speed up his own consciousness drive by performing experiments on a quantum processor, he was able to run multiple instances of the same basic AI simultaneously. This fact guided his efforts towards a method of doing the same with his own consciousness.
If Underspace Harvester Cores are the most important physical technology Rusty Manufacturing developed, then the Pilot system is undeniably the most important digital breakthrough. Just one additional instance of his consciousness allows for Rustybot to split his focus across two tasks at once without sacrificing his productivity on either.
Once the first Beta Drone was built and its Pilot connected, Rusty Manufacturing’s development capabilities went from additive to exponential.
Dataspace
Dataspace (not to be confused with The Datanet), is a digital representation of Rusty Manufacturing’s systems. Rather than being a single simulated environment, Dataspace is the culmination of RM’s computational power. Every server hub, research facility, production complex, and drone is directly connected via QEC circuitry. The result is a web of information and calculations flowing to and from every piece of equipment the company produces simultaneously.
In a certain sense, Dataspace can be thought of as the brain behind the company, forming Rusty Prime.