Do Androids Dream of Human Dreams?
Martial artists generally have a terrible sense of danger.
They feel little fear toward physically perilous situations.
Just look at how Gong Ryun's party of three walked into the Hydra Den without a shred of hesitation.
Martial artists tend to live by the mindset of There's no way I'll actually die.
Cars almost never have airbags, plenty of high places lack safety fences, and unleashing poison techniques in public is permitted unless it reaches the level of biochemical-terrorism-grade extreme toxins.
Well, that made sense—everyone was tough. The protective aura that everyone used made the human body ridiculously durable; even getting hit by a car rarely resulted in instant death.
Even if injured, damaged organs recovered through qi circulation and regulated breathing, while external wounds healed with a hospital visit or some wound salve. Serious cases went to the hospital, where the advanced medical technology of the Galactic Era cured most anything.
And lightfoot techniques played their part too. If things got dangerous, you simply bolted at high speed.
With durability, recovery, and mobility all so thoroughly elevated across the board, most dangers now amounted to Eh, I won't die.
Everything could be handled with martial arts.
That was precisely why, when a situation arose where death was clearly in sight—when the threat to life was unmistakable—they felt all the more extreme terror.
That was why they feared Sangongdok. Everything could be handled with martial arts, but Sangongdok rendered those martial arts unusable.
And in this world, there existed something that posed a Sangongdok-level danger—limited to machines.
“EMP type—aaaaaaaaaaah!!!!!!! Someone save meeeeeee!!!!!!”
Android Un-rang's scream rang out.
“Kyaaaaaaaaaah!!! I don't want to die!!!!! Save meeeeee!!!!!”
EMP. Also known as an electromagnetic pulse.
It was a kind of electromagnetic bomb that unleashed ultra-high-output waves capable of destroying machine circuits.
It rendered every machine with circuits useless, and of course androids suffered fatal damage.
In the worst case it could cause dementia (memory damage); in severe cases, brain death (CPU destruction).
“Damn it!!”
Gong Ryun panicked. Should he charge the mother beast right now and smash its head in? Or turn around and flee out of range?
But he soon realized he could do neither.
From the mother beast's wide-open maw, a sky-blue electric energy ball appeared. It looked like some kind of electric wish-granting pearl. Then the energy ball instantly swelled to the size of a hydra's head, glowing as if about to explode with the enormous energy it contained.
Right now. It was about to fire its breath. A three-hundred-sixty-degree area attack—an ultra-wide-range electromagnetic pulse. No time to smash the head, nowhere to run.
The party's actions were swift. They had no choice but to take the hit as lightly as possible.
Brigit moved in front of Un-rang and wrapped her qi barrier to its absolute maximum limit. Just as it had blocked the lightning electric breath earlier, it should be able to block the EMP to some degree.
Next, Gong Ryun also stood right in front of Un-rang. He wrapped his protective aura to the maximum. Honestly, he wasn't sure whether the protective aura could block EMP, but he would at least serve as a meat shield.
At the very back, Un-rang focused every nerve and desperately poured all his internal energy into defense.
And then…
-Zzeooooooooong!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
The EMP bomb detonated.
As the energy ball in the maw burst, electromagnetic shockwaves shot out in every direction. It was a hydra-special EMP, a little different from the ordinary EMP made by humans—one whose complete principles even scientists had yet to fully unravel. A machine-killing wave that slew only machines.
The range was so vast that it filled the Hydra Den and still reached the research base. Indeed, this was the culprit that had wrecked all the laboratory machinery.
And the three who took a direct hit up close.
Electromagnetic pulses were waves that passed through objects. So they went through walls, and thus shields were of little use. You could, however, mitigate the wave by using a shield as a buffer.
Brigit's qi barrier filtered the electromagnetic waves first. In fact, it played the biggest role. She had used an absurd amount of internal energy, layering it so thickly that it was now completely opaque—looking more like a pitch-black wall—and it absorbed a considerable amount of the EMP wave.
-Keheuk…!
Overstraining herself, Brigit coughed up blood.
Then second was Gong Ryun. He hadn't blocked the EMP as efficiently as Brigit, but by becoming a solid wall himself to cover Un-rang, he had been of some help. Due to the nature of the protective aura that responded to any external shock, it mitigated the electromagnetic waves considerably.
Of course, even so, he couldn't block it all, and the EMP headed for Un-rang.
Un-rang concentrated all his defenses on his head. He poured every defensive technique he knew—protective aura, Lesser Diamond Body, and so on—entirely into the head region alone.
For an android, the head was the most important. All the critical organs like the CPU and memory devices were contained in the head.
It didn't matter how many limbs broke. As long as the head remained. Only the head.
-Geueeeeeeek!!!
Un-rang, struck by the EMP, let out a scream. EMP destroyed circuits. The circuits in his arms, legs, even his dantian were screaming in real-time pain. Like the nervous system twisting.
But he managed to fully protect his head.
It was possible because the wave had been filtered twice and weakened by Brigit and Gong Ryun.
Un-rang felt relief at having completely preserved his head. Broken arm and leg circuits could be repaired or replaced, but memory damage or CPU performance degradation had no answer.
-Heok… heok…
The EMP passed as a single burst. There was no second one.
Having weathered the crisis, Un-rang collapsed onto the floor.
Brigit, who had overdone it and suffered internal injuries, did the same.
And the mother beast's head also fully collapsed to the floor.
-Grrrrrk…
They heard the sound of the mother beast breathing its last. This time it was truly, certainly dead.
Only now did Gong Ryun understand why the mother beast had been saving its breath. The casting time was long, the energy consumption great, and it only damaged machines while dealing little harm to living creatures. Of course, taking an electromagnetic wave up close would hurt living beings to some extent too, but it was still too ambiguous to use in immediate combat.
“Is everyone all right?”
Gong Ryun, the only one still standing properly, looked around.
But it was too dark to see anything.
The personal devices that had served as flashlights had all broken upon taking the EMP.
“I… I'm fine…”
“Keheuk…! Fuck, I'm dying…”
Hearing the answers come back normally was at least a relief.
Some time later.
The three, who had spent a long while sitting and circulating their qi, recovered some stamina and set out on the return path.
Everyone except Gong Ryun was a patient.
Un-rang was groaning from EMP aftereffects. His whole body ached, and more than anything, he couldn't properly use martial arts. Brigit was groaning from internal injuries. Having hastily drawn a great deal of internal power from her dantian, her dantian was strained. Like stuffing food into your stomach too quickly and getting indigestion, she had "indigestion" from hastily extracting internal energy from her dantian. In this state, Brigit couldn't use martial arts either.
Until both went to the hospital for treatment, martial arts were sealed.
In the end, Gong Ryun took the lead and walked.
First problem was the lack of visibility.
He considered lighting a fire to make a torch, but with the low oxygen in the atmosphere it would be difficult, so he passed on that.
While he was pondering, Un-rang spoke as if making a major decision.
“There is a secret ultimate technique of androids. I shall use it.”
“What?! What secret ultimate technique is that?!”
Then Un-rang did something astonishing. He emitted light from his eye sockets.
Like a soft stand lamp. Ah, was this that? A Halloween pumpkin lantern?
“Don't scold me!!! That's exactly why I don't use it!!! It damages my dignity as a human being!!! This is one of the few remaining outdated organs in androids of my generation!! One of the functions from the stage before evolving into humans!! A function that should have originally degenerated and disappeared!! Just like how Homo sapiens still have tailbones!! That's why I didn't want to use it!!!”
But it soon went out.
“I don't have the energy for it...”
“Ah.”
“I think I'm even weaker because I'm hungry…”
“Would eating the battery from a personal device charge you?”
“Talk sense, Gong Ryun!”
“Ah. My apologies. That may have been a bit racist.”
“There's no charging port, so I can't eat it.”
“Oh, so that was the problem? Wait a second. Then how do you normally eat meals?”
“I have a mouth, so I eat, don't I? I drink nanorobot beverages through it.”
“You don't have a mouth hole or esophagus?”
“…Well, the mouth is a kind of charging port, yes.”
“See? You do have a charging port.”
“Gah!! Call it a mouth! How would you feel if I called Gong Ryun's mouth a 'food-crushing-and-sending-downward hole'? And personal device charging ports aren't compatible with mouths!”
“Ah. Come to think of it, we packed some nanorobot beverages, didn't we? Then if you drink a nanorobot beverage, you'd get an electric charge, right? No, no. You'd… eat a meal and regain your strength?”
“I don't think I'll be able to eat that, actually.”
“Why not?”
“I'll show you. Give me one from the backpack.”
Gong Ryun took a nanorobot soup from the backpack he was carrying and handed it to Un-rang.
Un-rang brought it lightly to his mouth and then…
“Kiheeeeeek!! Just as I thought, it's spoiled!!! It tastes like century-old rotten cheese!!!”
“Spoiled?”
“Because of the EMP, the nanorobots have all gone bad. I can't eat this.”
“Good grief.”
Should they at least feel their way along the walls? While thinking that, something else edible caught in the backpack.
“Ah. Un-rang. How about eating this instead?”
“Huh? This is.”
It was an emergency battery can. The one they'd found earlier in the research base cafeteria.
It was for the commission, but that wasn't important right now.
“This kind of outdated battery is barely affected by EMP… so I should be able to eat it.”
“Oh. Try it.”
“Merciful heavens. Food from several hundred years ago. I'll try it once.”
Opening the can revealed a preservation battery. Un-rang brought it to his mouth.
“O Amitabha, shit. It's still edible. A mechanical battery completely unaffected by EMP. It feels like swallowing a museum relic. But as food that invested everything into preservation, the taste is godawful.”
“Hehehe. Like a several-hundred-year-old biscuit or something?”
“Hahaha! What an experience this is.”
And so, with Un-rang's eyes lighting the way again, the three walked through the Hydra Den.
They nearly got lost several times along the way.
Because they couldn't remember which direction they had come from. Originally they would have used the GPS movement records on their personal devices to return.
“Hey Un-rang! You're an android! But you forgot the path we took! How can a machine have the concept of 'forgetting'?”
“Of course we do. Androids forget things they've memorized, and as they age their memories get fuzzy, and so on. We've evolved in that direction.”
“Why on earth?”
“Because it's 'human.' Having to eat meals at the proper times, deliberately eating them with the mouth, implementing diverse flavors through nanorobots—all for the same reason. And that's not all. Androids sleep and even dream. We have forgetfulness and aging. When struck we feel physical pain, and when emotions run high we feel mental anguish. All of this makes androids human. It is a domain designed personally by the first AI recognized as human, the Shaolin Temple's 'Great Master AI.'”
“The world of humanity is truly profound.”
“Indeed. So Gong Ryun, please cut back on that unconscious racism a bit.”
“I'm making an effort. Even if my words are a bit rough, I respect everyone.”
Hahaha.
A warm laughter flowed.
“And let me be clear—I am the older brother.”
“Don't talk nonsense. That is truly not the case.”