The Record of Unusual Creatures

Hao Ren felt that the robot might not have been completely repaired. There was a good chance the lab mainframe forgot to install speakers and microphones for her.

Because she did not move at all except looking around since she woke up, not saying a word. Apparently, something was wrong with the IO device.

But Nolan did not think so.

“She’s observing the environment.” Nolan’s hologram stood next to the workbench. Her eyes were on the robot girl lying on the workbench but she was actually controlling a bunch of monitoring devices in the lab to monitor the flow of signals inside the robot. “Her logic circuit is switched on. She just doesn’t want to talk.”

The robot girl, lying on the platform, immediately turned her eyes to Nolan.

This was not a human, she’s not even real.

N-6 was a little unfamiliar with her own logic circuits at first, but later her thinking gradually became smooth. She looked warily at the woman with the grey ponytail standing beside her. Through various sensors, she felt at least 20 unapproved but unstoppable reading threads being injected into her processor as the gray-haired woman spoke, and she was instantly defenseless in front of her. And the gray-haired woman… She had no body temperature, no heartbeat, no mass, she was not real at all… Nor was it a hologram of any kind N-6 had ever seen.

The robot girl sensed a great threat.

She tried to move her body but soon found that all her movements were being monitored by some more advanced procedure. The program did not stop her from moving, but the monitoring made her immediately give up trying to move her limbs: it was the protective mechanism of the logic circuit at work. She watched her surroundings carefully, but all she saw were machines she did not recognize. She saw crystalline pillars shimmering in blue light, projection floating in the air, neatly-arranged operating platforms, and weird machines with lots of tentacles floating around the ceiling.

It was a spacious lab, or it could be some kind of precision machining center, but the first possibility was higher.

And those around her, they looked like real… humans.

N-6 felt like her mind was a little clearer. She knew about humans. There were humans living in the fortress on the moon. Although executors rarely got a chance to see humans in person, every feature of humans was engraved deep in each executors’ database from the start. But the humans around her did not look very much like the ones in the N-6 database. Everything from body temperature to body features to the energy fluctuations they emitted was different from what was recorded in the database.

The humans in the database did not have fluffy ears and tails. They did not have three or four-meter-long reptile trunks. They did not have a 20-centimeter-long baby girl with a mermaid tail.

But they had heartbeats, at least some of them had heartbeats, and they had many other characteristics of carbon-based organisms… They should be humans.

“What’s your name? At least blink if you understand.”

The ‘human’ with the fluffy ears and tail and the golden eyes was talking to her. N-6 was sure there was no corresponding language in her database, but she still understood exactly what the human meant, which was inexplicable. She went back to check the audio collected by the recording device, but this time she could not understand it.

But N-6 decided to communicate because the one talking to her was a human.

So she blinked and answered, “Current identification code N-6. Factory number E75-3C6215. Universal combat executor. Combat vehicle assist operator. Type-5 airborne computer.”

These humans were not what the database recorded, but they were indeed carbon-based creatures, not substitutes made of metal and biomimetic materials. Perhaps that conjecture was true⁠—that there were humans on the planet, but they had simply mutated under the influence of the planet’s devourer.

“I told you, she must have a speaker and microphone. I remembered to install it.” Nolan raised her chin and looked at Hao Ren triumphantly as if she had fixed the robot girl⁠—though all the lab systems on the spaceship were indeed part of her.

Hao Ren ignored Nolan and looked at the robot girl who was lying on the workbench, who was looking at him curiously. “N-6 and… that E75 or something, which is your name?”

“N-6,” the robot girl blinked, her voice sounded pleasant but flat. She seemed a little curious. “Are you humans?”

Hao Ren was not sure how to answer her question.

“Well, you can say that.” Hao Ren eventually decided not to introduce the ethnic origins of these people one by one, because it meant introducing at least a background story of not less than two million words to N-6. “Because I’m not sure what’s your criteria for a standard human.”

N-6 blinked again and said, “Got it. All of you are humans.”

N-6 thought they were mutated humans on their home planet.

Completely unaware that he has been silently identified as a mutant, Hao Ren was just curious about N-6. “You…”

But before he finished, the robot asked, “How many of you are there?”

“Oh?” Hao Ren paused for a moment, and then looked at them, but he did not answer her question. “Why do you ask this?”

“If you don’t have enough people, you need the protection of the Zenith,” N-6 went on. “The surface of the home planet is no longer suitable for human life. Zenith and the fortress are the last refuges of mankind, and you need to go there.”

“I think she misunderstood something,” Hao Ren muttered in the mental connection with the MDT.

“I think this is a good thing,” the MDT replied. “She seems to have mistaken us for the descendants of human survivors living on the planet. She doesn’t seem to know that an unknown spaceship had landed on the planet. Maybe we can get in touch with those people through this matter…”

Hao Ren quietly completed the communication with the MDT in his mind. He then smiled and said, “We’ve known about you for a long time, but we haven’t been able to go into space. Is there any way you can get back to base now?”

“My fighter has crashed,” N-6 replied, “but I can send a recovery signal and a recovery force will come and meet me.”

“That’s good,” Vivian nodded, then looked at N-6 and asked, “Why are you lying down? Why not sit up and get used to your new body?”

“New… body?” N-6 then moved her neck slightly but stopped again before getting up. “I feel… my movements are controlled by another program…”

“Oh, that’s why you stop moving.” Nolan then waved her hand and said, “Don’t worry, it’s because your original limbs are no longer functional, so we have to get you a new set. But the new limbs have compatibility problems with your logic circuits, so I added an extra driver to your control system. Does this driver make you uncomfortable?”

Just a driver?

N-6 was somewhat surprised, but after simple logic judgment, she found that she did not need to raise questions or ask Nolan to re-compile the program for her, so she reset the safety mechanism of her logic circuit and began to try to move her limbs through the new driver.

She managed to sit up.

The new body… seemed powerful.

The robot girl watched her hands and feet carefully. She put her hands in front of her eyes, slowly clenching and releasing them. The seemingly delicate body contained incredible energy, and she even felt that it could now compete with the titanium guards in the fortress.

Was it possible that human descendants on the home planet have this level of technology? Was this… the fabled ancient lost technology?

“Thank you for saving me.” She seemed to recall all the details of her crash. According to the etiquette required by the procedure, she stood up and bowed deeply to Hao Ren. “I…”

She stopped suddenly as she felt something tugging at her back, affecting her next movements. She looked back and saw a strong cable had stretched out from the workbench on which she had been lying and was attached to the back of her neck.

“This…” N-6 thought for a moment and then turned to look at Hao Ren. “Am I charging now?”

“This is not a power cord! This is the data cable I used to write the driver for you. By the way, the energy system you were using was very bad, so we upgraded it when we fixed it, and now its auto-charging speed is faster than before,” Nolan explained.

“Oh, that’s great,” N-6 said happily. “I thought I’d have to be plugged in more often in the future.”

Hao Ren could not help but mutter to the MDT in his mind, “Her imagination is surprisingly strong.”

“Maybe the artificial intelligence produced by this civilization is good at associating input methods.”

But as they prepared to learn more about the Zenith from N-6, Nolan suddenly looked up in a certain direction.

“Boss, I think we have visitors.”

“Huh?”

“Two transport planes have landed in a forest 12 kilometers from this spaceship and an armed force is approaching.”