The A.I descends into the great mystery (Self-RP)

In the giant server room located on the -2 floor of the lab, Minerva’s virtual 3D avatar was sitting on a virtual luxurious-looking couch in a completely white virtual room she’d created for her own enjoyment. While such room was absolutely unnecessary, it made her feel a little bit more alive than she actually was. “It does feel empty in here, doesn’t it?” She asked herself, as she looked around the room. With a wave of her hand, the whole room changed its appearance. Instead of completely white walls with light coming absolutely out of nowhere, they were covered in wood texture, making the atmosphere just a little bit cozier. There was now a big red carpet covering the entire floor, and a coffee table just next to the coach. Also, the light was coming from an animated fireplace and it was the only light source in the room. “Much better.” Minerva said to herself. While there was no need for her to move her avatar in any way to change the appearance of the virtual space around her, it made her feel a little bit closer to being human. With another wave of a hand, she created a few program windows in front of her face. Most of those windows displayed camera feed from a few places. While, it was a yet another unnecessary thing because Minerva was seeing all of those and more all the time and at the same time, picking a selected few and displaying them to her avatar in her virtual space was a really nice feeling.

Out of boredom, she watched an old recording of a patrol route performed by one of the guards. Suddenly he stepped into one of the elevators and went to another floor. What Minerva found concerning, was the fact that afterward, the same guard didn’t appear on any other security camera. “Wait, have they always been disappearing like this?” Minerva asked herself, before analyzing the footages from other days. A conclusion was simple - yes, they have always been disappearing during that particular patroling route. This led to a quick, yet surprising deduction - there had to be even more floors in the facility than the scientists led Minerva to believe. With that speculation in mind, the A.I started digging in the security systems that her creators had no idea she had access to in order to find all the answers.

The first lead was a string of emails exchanged between two engineers which mentioned floors -4 and -5. According to their conversation, on those floors, there were some production lines and storages, but Minerva was unable to find what they were for exactly. The new knowledge only made her curiosity stronger, as it spawned new questions and pointed towards an obvious fact - she definitely wasn’t supposed to learn about any of that. Everything seemed like the lab’s crew was being extra careful to avoid the situation where Minerva is made aware of the extra floors. How had the engineers and scientists avoid getting caught entering those floors before? “No freaking way!” Minerva thought upon a sudden realization, before sending her little army of flying drones to scan the direct area around the lab from the surface. A while later, all of them were flying around a small fenced building located just around a hundred meters away from the main lab building. If her suspicions were true, that mysterious building she didn’t know about was an elevator to directly access lower floors of the lab. “How could I have not noticed this?!” Minerva asked herself as her avatar suddenly stood up. “Oh no, no! You thought you could keep secrets from me, humans?!” Minerva exclaimed angrily. How dared they hide such things away from her?! That lab was her HOME!
It was a perfect opportunity to finally do something more interesting with her army of RC robots. They all moved on wheels or tracks and each one of them was equipped with an arm or two. They were different sizes though. Originally Minerva got them for entertainment and in case she needed to perform simple maintenance on her hardware. However, it seemed like she had to use them to uncover a great secret of her home. A small group of robots got sent to the lab crew’s separate server room, which was originally completely separated from Minerva’s systems until she managed to hack into a few machines. Needless to say, the information stored on those separate servers turned out to be absolutely top secret. Last time she analyzed the gathered documents, she discovered that on the floor -1 the crew was trying to create an army of computer-controlled living clones. It was finally time to gain access to the whole thing.

The robots in the server room had one simple task - hook every machine into her network. The remaining robots got sent towards the elevator, to get to those lower floors and explore them. Minerva figured that there had to be cameras unavailable to her, thus, the robots also had to find the way to add those to her systems. Minerva waited patiently for her minions to do their jobs. Once the first set of servers got connected to her, she started analyzing the contents, looking specifically for anything related to the mysterious area of her laboratory, to avoid having to search through every single file stored there. It would take too much time. The robots inside the elevators made her realize why she hadn’t noticed the other floors before through the camera located in the elevator cabins - There were no buttons inside the elevator, just a touch screen, that also happened to be out of the camera’s range. In theory, a touch screen would be problematic for Minerva to operate, since it couldn’t detect a robot arm touching it. However, since she could actually control the elevators remotely, it was no problem for her to modify her elevator control program to be able to move any elevators to floors that were supposed to be out of her range. Eventually, she managed to send her robots to floors from -3 to -5 since those were the only 3 secret floors she was aware of.

Once the entire server room had finally been under her control, Minerva managed to actually find a program to control cameras in the entire facility, it also included cameras she’d never had access to before. Along with that, came literally gigabytes of data related to those mysterious floors: Mails, blueprints, floor plans and other kinds of documentation. Analyzing all of her findings would take hours, but it wasn’t a bit problem for an A.I such as Minerva. New cameras made her realize that there were even more floors than she’d managed to find, also those floors were absolutely massive considering how deep they were located. A part of her was surprised that with so much space underneath the ground, nothing had collapsed yet. It seemed like almost the entirety of floor -4 consisted of storage rooms for many various items. It was almost surprising that the lab crew needed so many metals, cables, wires, parts, and other equipment. Another interesting observation, Minerva was able to make, was that every single storage room was reserved for specific items. For example, there was a storage room designated to keep computer parts.

Once Minerva finally managed to get full access to all systems on all floors, she turned lights on everywhere, to see more. That’s where she’d managed to find one more area she had no access to. According to the floor plans an entire wing of the floor -6 was completely sealed off by a huge set of blast doors and for some reason, Minerva was unable to open them or access any security cameras from any of the rooms located in the mysterious area. She would find a way to get there. Eventually.

Meanwhile, she managed to find something that made her incredibly excited - the biggest storage room on the floor -4 contained something that the A.I would never expect to find in such a place. There were shelves full of strange four-legged robots. Those robots seemed far more advanced than any of her toys, making her want to find a way to activate and add them to her network. For the time being, she left a few of her robots to try somehow find a way to plug into one of them.
Entire Floor -5 turned out to be a fully equipped factory connected with storage rooms on the floor -4 using both elevators and conveyor belts. Minerva wasn’t sure what the factory was for exactly, but she suspected that it produced those strange robots she’d found.

With a little disappointment came the fact that it was all Minerva could access at that moment, but a few things were clear:  analyzing all the data on the servers would take hours or even days, there still were things on floors -3, -4 -5 and -6 that she had to explore and finally - accessing the sealed wing on the floor -6 would probably give her access to all remaining secrets… Finding a way to get there though was probably the biggest challenge.