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.
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.
The file sat in the directory, a clean Factorio.v1.1.72-GOG.zip [1]. One click, and the sequence initiated. The simulation did not just load; it exhaled.
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.
The Engineer turned his back on the slaughter. He didn't care about the indigenous life. He didn't care about the ruined atmosphere. He looked up at the stars, where a lone satellite was beeping its telemetry back to the planet [2]. The factory must grow [2].