[The Nexus] Chapter 3 - Androids (I) (Patreon)

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Chapter 3 - Androids (I)

Minutes trickled by slowly as he fought against the army of machines with everything he had. Over the past year, Harry had applied himself to getting better at magic more than he had ever done while he was in school because it was literally tied to his survival. 

That said, despite all his efforts, and although the soldiers were also doing everything in their power in the fight against the machines, they were losing ground at a rapid pace. The enemies were just too numerous.

Due to the machines singling him out and sending large groups his way, Harry was forced to teleport away once more, every Apparition leaving him increasingly drained and affecting his ability to focus. 

The soldiers were all startled, and he had almost gotten himself shot when he suddenly teleported in front of them. 

“I’m here to help!” he shouted quickly. 

The situation was too dire for them to start questioning him at that moment, so everyone just focused on emptying their clips into the army of machines ahead of them. 

“Take cover!” the commander shouted when the sky was suddenly filled with a large number of laser projectiles. 

Now the machines had finally gotten close enough to attack them. 

The soldiers all hid behind their barricades, but those could hardly serve as protection against the hail of laser attacks. 

Screams of pain came from the soldiers, and Harry watched in horror how a soldier’s leg got blown to pieces. 

‘Wait, what is that?!’

Although the soldier screamed in agony, there was no blood coming from the remaining stump of his leg. . . for it did not appear to be human. The only thing Harry could see was metal, wires, and sparks. 

It was an android. 

Inwardly, Harry was shocked. He had not known what to expect the androids to look like, but now that he was seeing one with his own eyes, he finally understood why the machines confused him for an android: he hadn’t noticed anything that would tip him off that the soldier was an android until he saw his leg explode. They looked virtually identical to humans. 

But that was not the time to be surprised. Once the hail of lasers ended, he dropped his Shielding Charm and the rest of the soldiers came out from behind their barricades and opened fire on the machines again. 

“Captain, I’m running out of ammo! I only have 3 rockets left!”

“I’m down to my last six clips!”

“Same here, only four clips left!”

Just as they had predicted before the start of the fight, it looked like they were going to run out of ammo long before the end of the battle. 

The captain glanced at the approaching sandstorm and then at the furiously advancing army of machines. She bit her lip in frustration. 

“Just hold on. Please hold on until the sandstorm,” she pleaded with them. 

“Hold on with what? You want us to fight them bare-handed?” one of the soldiers shouted. 

“I knew we should’ve left! It was suicide to listen to those stupid orders!” a female soldier said. 

“Fuck it. You guys can die on your own,” another spoke up at that moment and threw down his rifle before breaking into a run towards the approaching sandstorm. 

“Sam!” the captain shouted after him. “Don’t be stupid! This is treason! They’ll send headhunters after you!”

“I’d rather take my chances with them than stay here and be guaranteed to die! I ain’t throwing my life away for a goddamned pyramid!”

Two more soldiers turned tail and ran after Sam, but they weren’t considerate enough to leave their weapons behind for the rest of their squad to use them. 

Harry could barely make out their conversation over the loud sounds of fire weapons, but he got the gist of it, especially when he saw the three deserters running towards the sandstorm. 

‘I don’t know what their objective is here, but this is clearly a losing battle.’

He couldn’t blame the three who had run away to save their lives. Judging by the way things were going, the close-range machines would reach their location in two or three minutes. If they allowed the machines to engage them in melee, they would be slaughtered.

“Captain! Give us the word to retreat!”

“Captain! They’re almost onto us!”

The person in charge looked conflicted. The orders from above stated explicitly that they were to stop the machines from advancing at any cost, but the pleas of her subordinates and her own desire to live on another day were fighting against her sense of duty and responsibility. 

It was at that moment that Harry shouted at her from the frontline:

“I’ll hold the ground machines at bay! I can do it! Save your ammo for the flying types and run! Trust me!”

It was crazy to put her trust in someone she had just met; furthermore, if she had not seen with her own eyes the many wondrous, inexplicable abilities the young man in front of her possessed, the captain would have not taken his words seriously. But the current circumstances left her with no choice but to do as he said. It was a gamble, but it was the only chance they had to make it out alive.

“Everyone, fall back! Run towards the sandstorm. Alice, Ryan, Lira, Darius, Salim, and Krei! Cover the foreigner! Fire at the flying types!” 

The moment that the captain gave the order to retreat, Harry stopped shooting all sorts of attacks upon the army of robots and took a moment to concentrate. 

Putting to use the discovery concerning Transfiguration and Conjuration that he had made over the past year, Harry imagined a rapidly flowing river with powerful currents before casting his spell:

“Aguamenti!”

A massive amount of water gushed out from the tip of his wand, falling down the sand dune he was on like a cascade, flushing away dozens of those 1.5-meter-tall cylindrical robots. 

‘No! It’s not enough! It’s too weak!’

His spell had not had any effect on the troll-sized robots. Their large and heavy feet sticking deeply into the sand below, the immense machines kept advancing against the flood. Moreover, the smaller robots started walking behind the gigantic ones, using them as shields to break the waves of water coming at them. 

He stopped his spell and took another moment to focus. Instead of a river, he thought of a massive dam, several hundred meters tall. Then he imagined that immense damn breaking, a hole forming into its midsection, and an extremely powerful torrent of water bursting out from it.

Unbeknownst to him, during his moment of concentration, his clothes started billowing, and a large cloud of sand was blown into the air due to the great accumulation of magical power. 

“Aguamenti!”

When he cast the Water-Making Spell a second time, it was truly as he had imagined. It was as if a dam broke and a torrent of water burst violently from his wand, almost blowing him back.

Hundreds of robots, even the gigantic ones, were flushed down the sand dunes and carried away, many of them getting killed in the process, either due to water infiltrating their cores or due to being crushed by the weight of other machines piling up on top of them. 

In a flash of genius, once the machines were flooded away, Harry raised his wand again and chanted:

“Glacius!”

The soldiers who had trailed behind to fire at the flying-type machines in order to provide cover for Harry and for their retreating comrades were left mouth agape when they saw the immense amount of water he had conjured. Following that, their surprise turned into outright shock when that flood was also instantly frozen. 

Hundreds of machines—an entire army—had been turned into sculptures of ice. 

They were just about to burst into whooping cries of joy and amazement when they noticed that the man who had made it all possible fell on his knees. 

One of them stopped firing at the flying machines and broke into a run towards Harry. 

“I don’t know how the hell you did all that, man, but there’s no way I’m letting you die here now!” he said as he grabbed Harry from the ground and put him over his shoulder. 

“Huh, you’re much lighter than I was expecting.”

The man’s words sounded to Harry as if he were stuck underwater. His hearing was muffled, it hurt him to keep his eyes open, and a feeling of vertigo made it hard for him to focus. He felt like throwing up. It was the result of overexerting himself. He had never cast any spells of that magnitude before. 

Nevertheless, despite how terrible he felt at that moment, he raised his wand at the large group of flying-type machines above and spoke one more word:

“Immobulus.”

 

⁂

 

The following half an hour was like a fever dream for Harry. He could only remember the soldiers catching up to their squad and how everyone held onto a rope as they ran headfirst into the sandstorm. 

‘Wait, I’ve already frozen all the machines. . . There are only the flying types left. . . Why not just stay behind and finish off the remaining ones?’

It was definitely doable, especially after he had immobilised a large group of the flying types with the last spell that he had cast. 

However, words wouldn’t come out of his mouth, no matter how hard he tried to speak. He couldn’t do anything at all. It was as if his body had shut down after casting that last spell. 

At some point, the wind and the sand beating his face vanished and the air changed. The sweltering temperature lowered to the point where he felt cold, and Harry half-opened his eyes to glance at his surroundings. As far as he could tell, they were in some sort of underground bunker.

The person who had been carrying him put him down, laying him on his back, and the rest of the soldiers sat down too with their backs against the walls of the bunker.

“Is he alright?” asked the captain, her question prompting many others to look at Harry. 

He felt a cool hand touching his forehead. 

“He’s burning up. He must’ve overheated,” a woman said. 

“Who is he really?” another one of the soldiers asked. “I’ve never seen anything like that.”

“I know, right? What the heck was that? He doesn’t even have a gun or anything. And creating force fields? Blowing up stuff? Levitating things?”

“You guys went ahead and didn’t see it, but I was there, providing cover fire for him. He summoned a whole river to flush the machines away.”

“Oh, come on, Darius, at least make it believable!”

“I shit you not, mate. Lira, you tell him!”

“He’s not lying. If I didn’t see it with my own eyes, I wouldn’t believe it either,” the woman in question confirmed. 

“Is he, perhaps, a new android model?” someone said in wonder. 

“Did we have this kind of technology?” another one asked. “It’s insane to think the higher-ups could create something like this.”

“If there were 100 more guys like him, I reckon we’d end the war with the machine before the end of the year.”

At that, the soldiers all started talking excitedly. 

“Hey, what if. . . what if he’s not an android?” someone suddenly asked. 

Two dozen heads turned to the speaker at the same time. 

“Well, he can’t be a machine, can he? There are no records of machines with our appearance. He’s obviously an android,” someone reasoned. 

“Unless. . .” someone began. 

“You’re not trying to say what I think you’re going to say, are you?”

“What if I’m right though? What if he’s not an android? What if. . . just imagine . . . what if he’s actually a human?”

A deafening silence was instilled, and sounds of gulping could be heard as all the soldiers turned to look at Harry. 

“Stop joking around. We haven’t seen any humans in centuries, have we?” one of them said sceptically, but his voice was trembling. 

Those words sent Harry into an inward panic.. 

‘So everyone around me is an android?’ he thought in disbelief. ‘Where are the humans then? How come they haven’t seen any humans in so long??’ 

“What’s that translucent thing covering his mouth?” someone asked and pointed their flashlight at Harry, making everyone take note of it. 

“I don’t know. Let me check.”

“Wait, don’t touch him! What if that’s some sort of life support thingy that's keeping him alive?”

It was almost eerie how two or three dozen tough-looking soldiers gathered around Harry’s body and started fidgeting nervously as they looked at him. 

“You know, now that I think about it, his body was super light when I carried him. Like, two or three times lighter than the average weight of an android.”

A chorus of murmurs erupted at what he said, and their anticipation grew even more.

“Anna.”

“Yes, Captain!”

“You’re the one who checked his temperature earlier, right?”

“Y-Yes.”

“Touch him again. See if he has a pulse.”

The captain’s words seemed to electrify everyone. 

Anna suddenly found herself flushing at the intense stares everyone aimed at her. She swallowed nervously as she walked closer to Harry. 

“Stop hesitating,” the captain hurried her on when she saw that Anna stopped as if she didn’t have the courage to go through with it. 

“Y-Yes,” she stammered a word of confirmation and put two fingers on Harry’s neck, on his artery, just below his jaw. 

Seconds trickled at a snail’s pace, everyone waiting with bated breath for the result. 

5 seconds . . .

10 seconds . . . 

15 seconds . . .

20 seconds . . .

“There is a pulse. . . there really is a pulse!” Anna said, her voice sounding almost as if she were afraid. 

The rest of the squad was thrown into chaos. 

“He’s human?!”

“Holy shit!”

“A real, living human?!”

“Oh my god!”

“Now it all makes sense! There’s no way an android would be capable of the things he did!”

“Of course that a human could do that, right?”

“I can’t believe I lived long enough to see a human!”

They all huddled around him, pushing and shoving each other, but none of them got closer than half a meter to him, keeping a respectful distance. 

Inwardly terrified of their overreaction, Harry was unable to keep up the pretence of being asleep and opened his eyes. 

A chorus of gasps came from them when he sat up and turned to look at them. Momentarily, he couldn’t see anything due to the two dozen flashlights aimed at his face, and he covered his eyes with a hand. 

"Everyone, put away your flashlights! You’re blinding him!” the captain shouted at them. 

With the lights taken out of his eyes, Harry felt chills go down his spine when he saw their facial expressions. 

‘Is this what animals feel like at the zoo?’

He answered his own question. 

‘No. . . this is different. . .’

Awe and wonder weren’t the only things he could see on their faces. . . If he had to put it into words, their faces looked exactly the way wizards and witches looked like when they met him for the first time in the Wizarding World. 

Harry was deeply familiar with that particular expression, for he had seen it more times than he could count.

It was worship. 

Involuntarily, his hand clenched around the handle of his wand (he had never let go of it). 

“Mister- . . .Sir. . . are you-, “ the captain began to say.

Uncharacteristically, the tough and stern woman was unable to find her words.

“Are you-, are you human?”

“Yes, I am,” Harry said. 

All of a sudden, he found himself mobbed, with the androids getting so deep into his personal space that he started panicking. When they also started putting their hands all over his body, he instinctively cast a Shielding Charm, repelling everyone. 

Their intense, worshipping, almost fanatic gazes made his skin crawl. It was as if he was in one of those muggle movies with zombies and he was the only human left alive. 

All of a sudden, the androids gasped and watched in disbelief how the first human that they had ever seen vanished into thin air, disappearing from their eyes. 

⁂

Two months passed since Harry’s rather unsettling first encounter with the androids. After Disapparating away from the bunker, he wasn’t sure if making contact with them again was a good idea. 

However, as days passed and his own feelings concerning the new revelations had settled down, Harry tracked the androids down and found their settlement. Knowing that, for some reason, the androids were tasked with protecting the Pyramids of Giza, it was not difficult for him to find them. 

Having learnt his lesson, Harry conjured for himself desert camo clothes similar to the ones worn by the androids and the same equipment consisting of boots, a helmet, a flak jacket, a mask that covered his lower face to protect him from the sand, and a pair of goggles. 

In addition, he also used some simple Transfiguration spells on his face, turning his hair brown, wiping out the scar in the middle of his forehead, and making his eyes blue instead of green. 

This being his fourth visit to the androids’ city already, Harry had also managed to steal a rifle from their armoury. Now, he looked no different from the thousands of androids in the city. That’s right: thousands of them lived together in an underground city, only a few kilometres away from the Pyramids of Giza. 

“The machines blew your bits and limbs away? Worry not! Darren’s got you covered! You won’t find cheaper maintenance fees anywhere in Memory Hold!”

“Selling filters, oil, ligaments, alloys [...]”

“How much for that left leg, boss?”

“50,000G. Non-negotiable.”

“50,000?! Why don’t you go rob a highway?”

“Maybe because the machines destroyed them all?” the shopkeeper barked back. “This leg is made of titanium. I’m almost selling it at a loss by asking for only 5000G!”

[...]

Although it wasn’t the first time he was visiting Memory Hold, Harry was still in awe. Bathed in neon lights of all colours, the bazaar looked like it was taken straight out of a Sci-Fi movie. The androids were selling all sorts of materials and items for maintenance and even body parts. 

But that wasn’t all. He could also see stalls where the owners were selling materials and items believed to have belonged to humans. Journals, earrings, books, and other trinkets like that were going for exorbitant prices, some of them even more expensive than the titanium leg from before. 

‘In hindsight, it makes sense that those androids reacted the way they did two months ago.’

His contact with the androids had been rather limited over the past two months, but Harry did interact with some of them. One thing stood out to him from the start: androids worshipped humans. 

Despite the fact that most of them had never seen a human in their entire life, they knew that humans had created them and that they were built in their image. Because of that, the androids tried to emulate humans’ way of life down to the tiniest details. They copied the way humans spoke and dressed, their social behaviour, and their mannerisms. He had even seen a few androids walking hand in hand on the street or standing on a bench and kissing, like couples. 

‘Do they know the meaning of what they’re doing?’ he couldn’t help asking himself. 

He was having a hard time wrapping his head around the idea that androids, basically robots, were acting so. . . human-like. 

‘Do they understand what feelings and emotions are? Do they know what love is?'

As he asked himself those questions, his mind went back to the day he met that group of androids. 

‘. . . They probably do. Otherwise, those 3 wouldn’t have deserted, would they? At the very least, they understand what it means to die. They’re afraid of death.’

Walking aimlessly as he looked around, Harry just followed the crowd on the street. Eventually, he found himself in front of a very wide, surprisingly large circular building. 

Not knowing what to expect, he passed through the wide-opened gates along with the rest of the people and then climbed up a flight of stairs. 

At the end of the stairs, he found himself at the very top of the stands of a large coliseum-like arena. 

Although it was his fourth time in the underground city, that was the first time he visited this place. 

“Hey, mate, mind telling me what this place is?" Harry asked one of the androids who happened to sit next to him in the stands. It was a blond man with an unkempt beard and dark bags under his eyes. 

“First time in Memory Hold? Where about you from?” 

“I’m a newer model,” Harry lied. “I’ve only been in Resistance Camps before, never in a city.”

“Ohh, you’re a baby! Hahah! C’mere,” the android said and threw an arm over his shoulder as if they were old pals. “Take a chug!”

“What’s that?” Harry asked, eyeing the small canteen suspiciously. 

“It’s liquor. Well, not the kind of liquor humans drank, but it’s made to emulate it. Gives you a warm feeling in your stomach and a nice buzz in your head.”

“I’m good, thanks.”

“More for me then!” he said and took a big gulp out of the canteen before shivering and letting out a groan of pleasure. “Ah, yes, that’s the good stuff! Anyway, I didn’t catch your name.”

“I’m Harry. What’s your name?”

“Well, Harry, what you’re about to see is the best sport in the world right now!” the drunk android said, forgetting to introduce himself. 

Now that piqued Harry’s curiosity. 

“We’re about to witness a battle between gladiators. I heard humans used to love this kind of stuff too!”

A bad feeling crept up in his heart at the android’s words. He didn’t have time to ask more questions because a female voice rang throughout the arena:

“Are you ready for another feast of oil, gears, and blood?”

A loud cheer burst from the hundreds of androids gathered in the stands. 

“I ask you again. Are you ready?”

The crowd burst into even louder roars of excitement. 

In the meantime, two gates on opposing sides of the arena opened, and an android and four machines—one large machine, over 4 meters tall, and three small, around 1.5 meters tall—walked in. 

“Then you are in the right place! Let the fists fly! Let the feet kick! I want you to kill, kill, KILL!” the female voice shouted passionately. “Kill until you’re soaked in blood! Kill until your feet slip in pools of your own lubricants!”

“And now… Let the fight begin!”

“Watch me turn these fuckers into scrap metal!” the android boasted, making the crowd burst into cheers for him. 

He took out his large zweihander and broke into a quick run towards the machines, faster than the speed of any human, to the point where his body almost appeared like a blur. 

“We must win! We must win!”

It was the same robotic, seemingly emotionless voice. Harry wasn’t surprised to hear the machines talk but it was the first time he had heard them saying anything other than their usual “Die, android!”. 

“I will fight! For my children!” the large machine said, charging towards the android. 

Back in the stands, the androids started booing at the machine’s words. The blond android sitting next to Harry was no different either. 

“Look at them, lying pieces of trash! Machines don’t have children! Kill them all, Gabe! Rip them apart!”

The android in the arena dodged the large machine’s charge and swung his large sword at one of the smaller robots, cutting it in half. 

'How did he cut a robot with a sword of all things?' Harry wondered absent-mindedly.

A wail came from the rest of the machines, and they shouted:

“Why do you kill us? Why do you kill us?”

“My sister! You killed my sister!”

“My child! You will pay, android!”

“Die! Die! Die!”

Disturbed by what he was witnessing, a different thought came to Harry’s mind:

‘Are the machines intelligent like the androids too?’ 

‘Are all machines like that? Or only these ones?’

None of the machines he had encountered before had shown signs of intelligence, only bloodlust, so he had never felt bad about destroying them. But as he continued watching the fight in the arena and heard the machines begging for their lives, an uncomfortable feeling appeared in his stomach. 

“No! I don’t want to die! I don’t want to die!”

“Please don’t kill me! Please don’t kill me!”

The longer the fight continued, the more that feeling of discomfort grew. Eventually, he couldn’t bear to keep on watching and stood up from his seat, heading towards the exit. 

He didn’t know what he was supposed to do. On one hand, until then, the machines had been his enemy, trying to kill him on sight. But on the other hand, hearing the words spoken by the machines in the arena had shaken his worldview. 

All sorts of confusing thoughts appeared in his mind at that moment.

‘Those machines weren’t like the ones I’ve met before.’

‘They were intelligent. They were acting as if they were a family. . .’

‘. . . Is it right for the androids to force them to fight?’

In the end, he knew too little about the current world. 

If humans created the androids, who created the machines? And why were they at war with each other? How had the world decayed until it reached that state? Where were all the humans? 

There were too many questions and no answers whatsoever to any of them. 

He was broken from his train of thought when an ear-piercing sound came from the speakers installed over the entire city and from the arena too before the deep voice of a man rang:

“To all the androids fighting against the machines. This message is from the Council of Humanity.”

“5012 A.D. The year mankind’s glorious history came to a sudden and abrupt end when they were invaded by aliens from beyond the stars.”

“The aliens unleashed a new breed of weapon—machine lifeforms—that all but annihilated human civilisation. The handful of survivors that remained fled from Earth, seeking refuge on the moon.”

“5204 A.D. Humanity launched its counterattack, deploying an army of androids from a network of orbiting bases. But after more than a dozen large-scale descents upon the enemy, we still haven’t managed to repel the invaders.”

“11,939 A.D. We are in the midst of the 14th Machine War. While the war has remained deadlocked, we know that our continued safety on the moon is only possible thanks to your valiant efforts on the ground. The Council of Humanity has not forgotten your work and your sacrifice. That is why, in order to break this stalemate, we have created a new weapon. A new organisation: Yorha. They will help you put an end to this war.”

“We ask that you continue giving your all to the mission of recapturing Earth from the scourge of the machines!”

“Glory to mankind!”