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polished pseudo-plastic and how cold it was in the near vacuum of the hangar.
    Pleased with my new form, I took a more thorough look around. The cavernous structure was surprisingly bare. Well lit and mostly white, the hangar walls were covered with semitranslucent panels. On the ceiling, hanging like a nest of giant white spiders, were a series of manipulator arrays—clusters of mechanical arms, each with a complex suite of tools that could be used in tandem with each other for a variety of tasks, though one was obviously the assembly of Capeks of myriad shapes and sizes. One or many of these arrays had probably finished putting me together moments before my awakening. If I wanted to, I could switch my vision to infrared to determine which had been used most recently.
    “Is everything all right?” Yggdrassil asked with a hint of concern. Her words came over my internal communications system. I heard them as a voice but also as a stream of data that conveyed intent and emotion. Like telepathy with footnotes. As I listened, it occurred to me that she probably could have included images and other types of information as well.
    “I’m just getting used to it. This is an impressive facility.”
    “This part of the Womb is dedicated to the assembly of final components. I think you would enjoy the manufacturing sectors even more if I had time to show you.”
    “What do you mean?” I was nervous. This was the second time I could hear a sense of hurry in Yggdrassil’s voice.
    “Brace yourself.”

RAGNAROK
    T he shock wave tore through the hangar like an apocalyptic ripple on the surface of a pond. The initial impact barely made a noise, with its existence only registering through vibrations on the floor. When the destruction finally caught up with it, though, it heaved the floor plates into the air like a tsunami tossing ships.
    Warnings flashed before my eyes, alerting me to the potentially harmful trajectory of the catapulted debris. Inevitably, the shock wave reached my feet, and I was flung toward the ceiling. The low gravity did little to slow my ascent toward the forest of mechanical arms and articulated tools.
    I managed to flip around with a quick burst of my thrusters, relying mostly on my subsystems to handle all the calculations and landing on my feet on the ceiling. My legs absorbed the impact, but as soon as I managed to balance myself after avoiding the many obstacles around me, gravity claimed me back, and I found myself plummeting to the ground. Again, I had to avoid a rain of debris and broken ground that fell all around me. Again, I narrowly dodged any significant impacts before landing safely on the shattered hangar floor.
    Closer to the epicenter of the shock wave, the hangar had partially collapsed, opening itself up to the empty sky above. I could see stars shining on black, empty space, except for one full quadrant of the sky, which was filled by the glowing presence of an enormous, nameless gas giant.
    No—not nameless. Stars and signature data from the enormous planet were parsed by my navigational core, identifying it as Asgard. This would mean that Yggdrassil was located on Midgard, the gas giant’s minuscule and only moon.
    “What’s going on?” I finally thought to ask, but only silence replied.
    “Yggdrassil?”
    There was no answer.
    I summoned a plan of Midgard into my field of vision and was glad to see that I could make my way to Yggdrassil’s central processing core and attempt to interface with her directly.
    I ran, pleased to discover that my small double-jointed legs could achieve surprisingly high speeds, especially in such low gravity.
    I jumped and weaved between debris and fallen chunks of ceiling, navigating the cracked and ravaged ground toward the open section of the hangar, deciding that traveling outside the facility would minimize the risk of getting caught by further caveins and collapses.
    No sooner did I manage to climb to the large opening ripped into the ceiling