The Mech Touch - Chapter 7497 Fragile Vanity

Unlike metallic mechs, biomechs could never achieve perfect or near-perfect consistency among copies.

Biomechs were grown, not built, so variations tended to occur much more frequently.

However, once biomechs had completed their relatively rapid growth process, their organic forms largely became fixed.

Even if they incurred large amounts of damage and subsequently regenerated back to ‘full health’, biomechs always tended to return to their initial mature templates as best as possible.

Perhaps older biomechs may still show changes and evolutions over time due to the natural aging of their organic components, deviations from feedstock or receiving particularly serious damage.

In most cases, the biomech pilots and the people that maintained the organic machines tended to view such changes as undesirable.

Maintenance and restoration became more expensive and troublesome. Biomech technicians with lower qualifications could not do their work properly when faced with complex changes and mutations that did not match the templates in their manuals.

The greater the deviation between an existing biomech and the original design, the more the biomech technicians needed to use their brains to properly administer the organic machine.

Not all changes and mutations were entirely benign. They could slow down the biomech, open up additional weak points or cause them to drain their energy reserves faster.

The maintenance crews all needed to use their judgment or the judgment of their superiors in order to determine which mutations could be retained and which ones had to be removed.

What complicated this matter further was that not every change could be removed in a quick and convenient fashion.

Organic mech parts were much more intricately connected with each other than with metallic mechs.

Removing or altering one organic system could negatively affect the rest of the biomech, thereby crippling it outright!

These reasons and more made it impossible to keep any single biomech exactly the same as it aged.

The older a biomech became, the more deviations it accumulated. This caused its value to degrade in the eyes of most people as its maintenance costs rose while its performance remained flat or began to show decline.

Ves found this to be a very terrible circumstance!

Even the Terrans, who possessed a more open-minded perspective towards biotechnology than other groups, had never accepted the notion that aging was a positive attribute for a biomech.

This caused them to value fresh biomechs over aged ones, which was completely upside down as far as he was concerned!

In fact, it was not unheard of for the Terrans to trash their older biomechs because they felt it was not worth the effort to maintain them anymore!

Even if the aged biomechs still retained much of their original strength and developed minor advantages due to their unique quirks, they still could not escape death sentences due to the crime of deviating from the norm.

How awful.

Ves wanted to change this horrible mindset towards older biomechs. He had invested a considerable amount of time to write extra chapters in the manuals. He wanted to convince every Terran that they should treat growth as an asset rather than a liability!

Fortunately, the Terrans had been remarkably quick to accept his arguments.

His prior works had all proven the validity of his arguments. His Woodsap mechs also brought so many new innovations that the people involved in the Arboreal Project had already been predisposed to treat them as completely new products that bore little resemblance to the mechs they worked with in the past.

It also helped that the Terrans carefully selected the biomech technicians for their competence as well as their adaptability.

Each of them took Ves and his design philosophy seriously. They did not blindly employ their usual solutions to remove any mutations that they managed to find. The biomech technicians instead recorded their findings and allowed the Woodsap mechs to retain their individual characteristics.

Though not every Terran could be convinced to value older living mechs over newer ones, these ones at least knew their business. Ves found it delightful to talk shop with them about the differences between his Woodsap mechs and more generic biomechs.

As Ves gazed admiringly at the Rosenstorm, he paid particular attention to the small but highly noticeable rose flowers growing from the front.

Though only two-dozen of these small roses had emerged in recent days, they drastically changed the look and feel of the Woodsap mechs.

Every Woodsap mech came in ebony brown at the beginning. Their bare TE Wood exterior possessed a distinctive bark-like texture, evoking the image of a resilient tree trunk.

However, these Woodsap mechs did not remain bare for long. The longer they existed, the more greenery began to grow and proliferate across their surface. Fresh green leaves began to grow and cover the mech frame, making it seem as if the biomechs were about to transform into trees.

The foliage provided slight benefits to the Woodsap mechs. They not only possessed the capability of absorbing low amounts of energy from radiation, but also strengthened their ability to absorb wood energy from the ambient environment.

The only problem was that they were quite fragile compared to the rest of the mech frame. A single plasma bolt or laser beam could easily light it all on fire, thereby removing all of the aforementioned benefits.

If not for the fact that it was quite easy for the Woodsap mechs to regrow their green leaves after a bit of rest time, many people would have grown more upset about this vulnerability!

Ves had already witnessed instances of Woodsap mechs relying on their azure energy shields to shield their leaf-covered frames from thermal damage. Once their energy defenses were about to break, they even chose to back off so that other mechs could withstand incoming attacks in their stead!

Though Ves found this habit to be a bit questionable. It was one of the other reasons why he felt the need to pay the test pilots a personal visit.

In fact, the Woodsap mech pilot that practiced this behavior the most was the Second Elf himself!

Although the Guardian of the Green lived up to his heritage and performed at the top of his cohort, his behavior had changed recently.

From the moment the first rosebuds appeared on his personal biomech, he instantly reined in his aggression and only allowed himself to remain proactive so long as his azure energy shield remained strong.

As soon as his Woodsap mech took too many blows, he backed off!

This completely neglected the greatest advantage of Woodsap mechs, which was their excellent capacity to endure repeated blows to their organic mech frames!

What was the point of investing so much time, energy and resources to develop a high-regeneration organic structure when the pilots refused to let it do its job?!

“Mr. Shuku.” Ves began. “I am aware that you greatly value the roses that your Woodsap mech has grown. I think it adds a lot of personality and uniqueness to your biomachine. You made the right call when you told the biomech technicians not to regard them as undesirable aberrations and cull them from the exterior. However, that does not mean that you should allow vanity to overtake your responsibilities. The point of letting these prototypes loose on the battlefield is to test their comprehensive performance, with a particular focus on their rapid regeneration capabilities under varying degrees of external pressure. What you and a handful of other Woodsap mech pilots have been doing lately is detrimental to your mission. Do you understand what I am saying?”

The tall and slender elf was not a stupid man by any means. As soon as Ves brought up the issue, he immediately realized his mistake.

Caracalla looked contrite. “I understand. I shall… correct my approach towards combat. I just find it regretful to let my beautiful roses burn into ash before they could properly bloom. Is there a way for you to adjust my Rosenstorm so that he can better preserve these flowers?”

Ves rolled his eyes. He did not take this request seriously.

“The purpose of Woodsap mechs is to do combat. To be more specific, I designed them with the explicit intention to withstand lots of damage and regenerate right back to full health. They are not meant to act as delicate flowers that need to be protected in an energy bubble at all times. These flowers and such might look pretty, and they also do a remarkable job of attracting more wood energy, but those are not good reasons to forsake the primary purpose of a combat mech.”

“…”

“Flowers are inherently temporal and short-lived.” He told the elf his own interpretation. “Instead of trying to fight against nature, it is better to play along with the natural order. Woodsap mechs were never designed to be tough and unbreakable. In fact, they are designed to break down frequently, only to get back up just as quickly. The same principle should apply to their flowers. Your roses may burn or wither in the next battle, but a new set of roses will appear the next day. It doesn’t matter how often this cycle repeats. Perhaps your Rosenstorm might grow a different set of flowers. Perhaps they will become increasingly stronger and more resilient as time goes by. It is not impossible for this to happen. As long as your emotions and desires are strong enough, your thinking pattern can direct the growth trajectory of your Woodsap mech.”

The Second Elf pulled himself out of his slump. “I have read that this is the case in the documentation, but none of the examples come close to this case.”

Ves smiled. “Woodsap mechs are deeply personal to each and every pilot that has bonded to them. Customization and personalisation has always been in the back of my mind when I worked on the Arboreal Project. Theoretically, every Woodsap mech possesses the potential to grow and evolve into different shapes over time. They can grow taller and slender without significantly impairing the performance of most of their bioparts. They can also grow thicker and tougher as long as the conditions are right. If you love roses so much that you want to turn them into a core component of your personal biomech, then you should keep your obsession alive. As long as your desires remain strong and consistent, the growth of your machine will reflect your intent in some way.”

This was possibly one of the best advantages of working with biomechs.

Unlike conventional mechs that could not change their mech frames on an autonomous basis, organic mechs could truly change or mutate without requiring any serious external intervention!

The only other mechs that could come close to biomechs in this regard were smart metal mechs, D-mechs and other machines with advanced repair systems.

However, Ves never counted them in the same category as true biomechs. The latter was just so much better predisposed towards gradual growth and evolution.

He actually found it a bit surprising that the Terrans and other biotech enthusiasts never designed biomechs that explicitly took advantage of this powerful trait.

They always made the mistake of applying the paradigms of metallic mechs onto biomechs.

The compulsion to standardize mechs and procedures had stifled the growth potential of these beautiful and dangerous organic constructs.

Ves intended to change all of that. He did not want people like Caracalla Shuku to consider Woodsap mechs as rigid and unchanging biomachines.

Change should be considered an inherent feature of biomechs as far as he was concerned!