Subject: Mia | Classif.: Barzakh

  “That’s why I had to—ow!”

  Jasper winced in pain after foolishly standing up all of a sudden. The little bot almost undid Mia’s hard work, having bandaged its wounded knee after the nasty fall from earlier. She wasn’t sure if this was how mech-humans even recovered, but at least it stopped the oil leak.

  Could their oil-blood even clot? Was a new joint needed, like having to replace a faulty gun part? The best person to ask would be her Dad. Or Dr. Awesome, if they both weren’t in the factory at the moment. But for now, “not aggravating the injury” was the answer.

  “Don’t move!” Mia reprimanded the bot, who slowly slunk back on the bench. She scooted over to have a closer look. Whew. The small blot of black on the gauze was still the same size and dry. No new bandages needed.

  “Sorry, but you get why I had to do it, right? Right?!”

  She slanted her head, still confused from the explanation moments earlier. “Because of a girl you like?”

  “Shhh! Keep it down!”

  There was no one else in the playground. Not a single soulless metal body as far as she could see. But there wasn’t any need to. That shot from before frightened off even those who were passing by.

  Jasper sighed. “I have to become brave. That’s the only way Iris would even look at me. That’s why I joined those three…” The bot looked down in shame, regret buzzing slightly after each word from its speaker.

  Mia scratched her head, eyebrows twisted. Romance is so complicated, whispered the wrinkles in her brain. Becoming a bully just to impress your crush? The killer inside her found all this to be shallow and stupid. Never did she imagine she’d be listening to a robot’s love drama. And from a child robot, too.

  “Why can’t you just tell her straight up?”

  “I would now, thanks to you. But she hasn’t come back yet…”

  “She’s outside the village?”

  “She went missing.”

  So even here, children go missing? Mia’s mind immediately went back to the orphanage on The Surface. Not all of the children there were abandoned by their parents. Some were kidnapped, taken from loving families. Hopefully, that wasn’t the case here in Byzantium.

  “Oh, but you don’t need to worry!” Jasper’s confidence pulled her out of her pondering. “Her Dad is the best hunter in the entire village! He’ll bring her back for sure!”

  “Dad?”

  “Oh, right—it must be pretty confusing for flesh-humans. But don’t worry! I just learned all about it in school!” The small bot seemed slightly bigger with its chest puffed out. “So when two adults love each other very much…”

  She swore she heard something along these lines from her Dad before.

  “... Their colors get mixed together! And once the village chief recognizes it, they’ll be blessed by a baby at their doorstep.”

  The ending to that explanation was not what she expected. There was something else. Something that latched onto her mind like a parasite the moment Jasper mentioned, “Dad.”

  “Does Iris’s Dad use a bow and have a single blue eye?”

  “Oh, you met Mr. Zaffre already? That’s great! Umm… I know I’m asking a lot, but when they come back, could you put in a good word for me?

  The battered robot that saved her from the cliff. The desperation in that voice. Hide-and-seek.

  Was there any coming back for that broken father?

  Subject: Mortimer | Classif.: Sirath

  There were some lines that should never be crossed. This was one of them. And it was one that Tim had seen plenty of times before.

  When driven to the brink of extinction, humanity had to adapt. In the Age of Monsters, humans undid the apocalypse back then through Ancient Magic. The next apocalypse came as a result of the war between the Mages and Alchemists, leading to the creation of the Spire in the Age of Alchemy. And when the Aberration War happened, robots took over as the stewards of mankind in the Age of Machines.

  The transition from that age to this current era was anything but smooth. Faced with the threat of human extinction, both man and machine agreed to something that should never have even been thought of in the first place.

  Abandoned by the gods that made them, they took fate into their own hands. They created life.

  The results were undeniable. The very fact that the Spire was populated with humans in just a few thousand years was proof of that. But the experiments, the inhumane research, the absolute depravity to get there was something he never agreed with.

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  The same methods that brought about his unnatural existence in this reality were reconsidered. Laws of nature reduced to mere suggestions. Lines between human and Aberration were crossed and blurred. The Spire might be home to about a billion or so humans now, but the road to get there took the lives of over a quadrillion homunculi. Souls that were never given a chance, dumped outside the Holographic Sea. Data and lines of code still searching for the bodies promised to them.

  He had personally wiped out all the research pertaining to the creation of human life. Destroyed entire nations over it. So to see an offshoot of the same biologically twisted methods happening before his very eyes crushed him. Like someone who was cured of stage 4 cancer, only for it to return in another part of the body years later. The respirator he wore was no longer just filtering chemicals around him, but also diffusing the rage seething from his breath.

  Those pipes from before fed directly into the rows of incubators in front of him. Small fridge-like chambers. Artificial wombs that once supported premature births, now reduced to growing humans as if they were livestock. The equipment and machinery were old, ravaged by time and rust to the extent he could never have guessed the factory was mass-producing life. And it was failing even at that.

  This barely functioning system murdered more than it nurtured. More than half of the unborn children here were already dead; victims of indifference. At the other end of this section, Dr. Awesome returned with a trolley, whistling as it took out the dead ones before tossing them into the cart. Where they’d be inevitably dumped, Tim didn’t want to know.

  It took him all the self-restraint he had to keep his Aberration side in check and not level the entire village in an instant. If not for Mia, this entire mountain would have become a cave. She was the anchor in his fractured mind that kept the whispers inside him at bay. They demanded justice. Grumbled and moaned to the Lord of Death that there was no more room left in the afterlife.

  Even as his fingers trembled and his vision blurred from pure, murderous intent, he kept walking. The cold cement floor failed to cool his righteous fury. Even the toxic air seemed more breathable than his own breath stuck within the mask. He yanked it out of his face; the strap at the back almost snapped. Almost.

  Hearing the audible “pop” of the strap, Safety Orange turned around, rebuking him. “I told you to keep the damn thing o—”

  “I’m tired of being human.”

  But Tim was not the one who answered. His mouth didn’t even open. Those were the words of an unfathomable being. The collective voice of infinity itself. The whispers inside of Tim escaped, bypassing sound and space to transmit the unified message directly into the CPU of the machine. That message was clear. A string of ones and zeroes emerged in the mech-human’s mind. And all it felt was fear.

  It showed no concern when it stared down the Immortal earlier. As a machine, it too, was immortal in a way. But when it heard Tim “speak” binary, it realized then and there—hidden inside the line of code was a command to commit suicide. If Safety Orange were not a robot, it would have killed itself, immortality be damned.

  If simply perceiving the voice of a god were this dangerous, what would happen if the being’s entire presence were revealed?

  The large bot stumbled backwards, almost cracking the cement with its weight as Tim tossed the mask over to it. Violent coughs left its system as it fought to purge the fear within. Even the orange light from its camera-eyes shuddered and twitched.

  “F-Fine! D-Don’t say I didn’t, ack, warn you!”

  The mech-human got up, wheezing and catching its breath for a while before walking off in a more hurried, frantic pace than before.

  Taking in a deep breath, the dreadful fumes that entered his lungs were a much-needed source of relief for his quiet wrath. In the face of his corrupted blood, even the unknown chemicals he inhaled were more panacea than poison. Cleansed into oxygen and baptized by anger, he could breathe once again.

  Just as his mind was clear enough to think once more, he felt a hand on his shoulder.

  “If you want this place destroyed without hurting Mia, let me know.”

  Lynn’s face and tone were calm, but Tim could tell from her hand; the heat beneath her skin was scorching. She, too, burned with ire. And if anyone had the right to unleash their anger, it would be her.

  The princess’s birth wasn’t too far from this setting, either. He could only imagine how she felt. To be brought into this world not out of love, but out of a perverse sense of duty. Granted, she was born of a human mother through twisted means, but she still had a parent. She had a family. She had a purpose.

  What purpose did these factory-made—not born—children have?

  “Let’s see Old Gold first. Then we decide,” Tim reasoned. If it were the old him, she didn’t even need to ask.

  A smirk appeared on her lips. Acknowledgment. For once, they were both on the same page. Violence was back on the table, appearing as a question. But whether the answer was “yes” depended on the village chief.

  Tim steeled himself, tempering his rage like a blacksmith shaping a sword. With every step forward, he analyzed his surroundings and the inner workings behind the factory.

  The various non-mech-human machines that ran the production line were crude. More industrial age than modern, they were unsuitable and ill-optimized for their purpose. But what they lacked in engineering, they made up for through enchantments. Forbidden science. The chemical byproducts haphazardly released into the air were proof of that.

  Whoever was in charge of this system had knowledge of Alchemy. A craft as old as Ancient Magic. Tim was only vaguely familiar with this ancestor of modern science, but even he could tell that it was overcompensating for the poor quality of the factory’s equipment.

  His fingers brushed against the metal pipes and the massive pumps. Everything in this section was set up to filter and convert an unknown gas into the basic elements of a human being. Oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen. But a mixture of molecules did not a human make. There was far fouler devilry at play.

  Safety Orange pointed out. “Old Gold’s behind this door. When you go in, try to, ahem, speak softly.”

  “You’re not entering with us?” Lynn asked.

  “Nope. My coughing’s too loud.”

  Tim moved closer to the large bot. “I hope you get better soon.’ But his words sounded more like a threat than a well-wish.

  “H-Hurry up and go in. I don’t wanna stand out here all day.”

  As Tim and Lynn stepped past the door, the room they were in was almost entirely dark. Nothing like the bright, industrial lighting from before. But even amid the dying light, both of them sensed unimaginable danger. Something was there with them. Their fight-or-flight response turned on along with their goosebumps.

  They reached out for their weapons. Tim, his revolver. Lynn, her sword.

  As a spotlight from the ceiling suddenly switched on, it illuminated what appeared to be a mech-human.

  “Shhh…”

  But the request for silence was not meant for Tim and Lynn. It was directed to the baby being cradled in its rust-eaten arms.