The Soul of the Super Robot
I picked up a piece of Punk candy. It was the same ordinary strawberry-flavored kind you could find anywhere in this world. The moment I popped it into my mouth and rolled it across my tongue, the flavor transformed into something else entirely—a newly engineered fruit from Earth.
The taste of that incredibly rare delicacy I had only been lucky enough to try once, long ago, spread through my entire mouth.
‘I can’t believe I can actually do this…’
I smiled as I kept rolling the perception-altered candy around with my tongue. Back on Earth, attempting something like this would have required filing an official request with the administration for the use of hypnosis and brainwashing in the lab. Naturally, an application just to change the flavor of a single piece of candy would have been rejected on the spot. Getting chewed out by my professor for “conducting weird experiments” would have been the cherry on top.
But here? This world had no suffocating regulations or bureaucratic watchdogs standing in the way of scientific progress. On top of that, this perception-alteration technology was something I had invented myself—well, to be exact, it originally belonged to the Fairy Queen, but the point remained.
In other words, no one could stop me.
‘Well, I still wouldn’t use it casually on other people, though.’
The reason I could freely use perception alteration was simple: the target was myself. Whether I did drugs, hired prostitutes, or killed someone—if I kept my mouth shut and didn’t get caught, who could possibly punish me?
Using it on others was a completely different story. What if Earth sent a rescue team to retrieve me after I’d been dropped into this world? What if the follow-up investigators looked into everything that had happened here? If they discovered I had performed hypnosis or brainwashing on the locals, it would be an immediate trip to prison. The degree I had suffered so much to earn, along with the entire life I had painstakingly built, would vanish in an instant.
I could never allow that to happen. Absolutely not.
—Dr. Scientist? Are you inside?
“Yes. Come in.”
—Excuse me!
I had been rolling the candy around in my mouth and grinning like an idiot when a combatant suddenly entered the lab. I looked at him questioningly, and he immediately stood at attention with his hands behind his back.
“The boss is calling for you! She said you weren’t picking up your phone…”
“Ah, really? I’ll head over right away. Thanks.”
“Not at all, sir!”
After hearing the combatant, I glanced at my smartphone. Only then did I remember that I had turned off all my devices—including the phone—so they wouldn’t be affected by the perception alteration.
I must have let my guard down after tasting Earth’s delicacies for the first time in a while.
The person I was now wasn’t a mere graduate student. I was an executive of a villain organization. An evil scientist. Reminding myself of that fact, I headed straight for the chairman’s office.
“Mmm—then let’s wrap up this regular executive meeting here. You’re all dismissed.”
After the villain organization’s regular executive meeting ended and the other executives had left, the boss spoke again as if she had just remembered something.
“Ah, Scientist, you stay behind. I have something to discuss with you.”
“With me?”
“It’s nothing bad, so don’t worry.”
I tried to think of what it could be, but nothing came to mind no matter how hard I thought about it. Especially since I hadn’t caused any incidents recently.
Once all the executives had left the room, the boss beckoned me over carefully. When I approached, she reached out toward my face. She grabbed my cheeks and began touching and prodding every inch of it.
“Hmm… not a single trace left.”
“…What are you doing?”
“Didn’t you use my face however you pleased? I was checking whether any traces remained.”
A while ago, during the boss’s parent observation day at school, I had attended and received quite the scolding from her. She had also asked how exactly I had managed to create a face that looked identical to hers.
I had explained the secret: I had used her own genetic information. She had been momentarily flustered by that revelation.
“The reason I kept you here is… a proposal for technical exchange has come in.”
“Technical exchange?”
“Yes. Technical exchange.”
I tilted my head in confusion at the boss’s words. Technical exchange? Who would our villain organization possibly exchange technology with?
By nature, technical exchange required both sides to give something up. And there was no one in this world capable of offering me any technology worth exchanging. The boss surely knew that too, so why bring it up?
“I don’t think there’s anywhere that could exchange technology with me…”
“I thought so too… but this proposal isn’t for the evil scientist. It’s for Eight.”
“What do you mean?”
“There are people who want the publicly known genius scientist rather than the villain organization’s hidden evil scientist.”
Only after hearing the boss’s explanation did I understand why she was bringing this up. The evil scientist—me, whom the boss had kept tightly hidden—didn’t get to wander around freely. However, the genius scientist Eight, whose identity had already been revealed, was a different story. He was a member of Scholar, the one who had discovered the soul, and was practically guaranteed to win the ABC Award.
It was common knowledge that the genius scientist Eight was a researcher at Evils Enterprise. So this technical exchange proposal had been sent not to the evil scientist, but to the genius scientist Eight…
“What is it about?”
“Research concerning the soul. To be precise, they want you to help them implant a soul into a machine…”
Implant a soul into a machine—. I had already done that once. The android that Dr. Kuroi, another member of Scholar, always kept by his side. When I had given emotions to Lucia, a soul had been created as a byproduct, hadn’t it?
So this research didn’t particularly interest me. Experiments I had already completed and could reproduce at any time didn’t really stir a scientist’s curiosity.
However…
“What are the conditions?”
“They’re excellent. Truly excellent. These people want the technology so badly that they’re throwing everything they have at us. Thanks to that, a single exchange will bring us benefits that are simply ridiculous.”
“So it’ll be that good as long as I accept?”
There was one surefire way to force a scientist to participate in uninteresting research: money.
Since ancient times, scientists had been creatures bound to research funding, and generous sponsors were beings that scientists had to worship and serve.
“I’ll do it. The exchange.”
“Good. Take two people with you for safety.”
“Two people? If my identity gets discovered…”
“It’ll be fine. That’s a much smaller problem than accidentally losing you.”
“Hmm… understood.”
And so I was dispatched to P City—not as the evil scientist, but as a genius researcher of Evils Enterprise.
The first thing anyone noticed upon entering P City was the overwhelming desolation. Countless factories were packed tightly together, and the smoke they belched out filled the entire sky.
Some people even felt dizzy just looking at the complex, tangled layout of the industrial structures.
A city built not for humans, but for machines. That was the true identity of P City.
“Cough, cough—! Damn it, what the hell is wrong with the air here?”
“Is it that bad? It’s tolerable for me…”
“That’s because you’re human. For a beastman, this kind of—cough!”
Galrm, who had entered P City as Eight’s escort, took one breath of the smoke-filled air and immediately began coughing violently. Seeing how his nose was already completely stuffed up, the polluted air seemed truly terrible for beastmen.
Of course, for Eight this level of pollution was just everyday life.
‘It’s not bad enough to need a gas mask, so…’
The atmosphere on the Earth where Eight had lived was relatively clean, but that only applied to the planet as a whole. The air in industrial zones packed with factories was literal hell on earth. Places so full of toxins that not even living creatures could survive, let alone humans.
Compared to those factories where walking past without a gas mask was dangerous, this much smoke was practically cute.
“—Welcome! We’re honored to have you!”
Before long, an employee from the company that had requested the technical exchange with Evils Enterprise came out to greet them. Eight shook hands with him warmly before heading straight to the site where the exchange was needed.
“If it’s Evils Enterprise, you’re referring to the place where that giant robot appeared recently and caused a huge stir, right?”
“Ah, yes. That’s correct.”
“Was that real? On the internet, the prevailing opinion is that it was fake…”
“I’m not sure. I didn’t see it myself.”
“Hahaha—right? Then it must have been fake after all.”
Eight barely managed to hold back from saying it really was a giant robot as he watched the employee laughing heartily. The man seemed strangely delighted by the idea that the giant robot that had appeared in E City was fake. Wasn’t the normal reaction to feel disappointed when something that exciting turned out to be fabricated?
Thinking that, Eight entered the research facility. The employee immediately handed him several documents and asked for his signature.
“These are nondisclosure agreements. As you’d expect, they’re contracts mediated through our superpowered individual. As you know, breaking them results in death.”
“…You die if you reveal the secret?”
“Yes. It’s that important of a research project. If you don’t like it, you may refuse.”
“No, now I’m even more curious about what kind of research they’re trying to hide this badly.”
Only Eight signed the documents. Galrm deliberately did not, just in case. If both of them signed and something went wrong, it would be dangerous for the escort. Even though the condition was that he couldn’t enter the lab without signing, Galrm didn’t care. If Eight was in danger, he was confident he could smash the entire research facility and break in.
After finishing the paperwork, Eight finally learned what kind of technical exchange they were requesting.
“This way, Dr. Eight.”
After passing through multiple security checkpoints, Eight entered the secret laboratory and immediately understood why they maintained such strict security—and why the employee had been so pleased that the giant robot from E City was considered fake online.
“…This is.”
“Yes. This is the main research project of Punk Technology.”
“Haha—! So you were building something like this?”
Inside the secret laboratory stood a giant robot that easily exceeded several dozen meters in height. It wasn’t the fake robot he had displayed at the sports field—one that only had an exaggerated size. This was a genuine super robot with every single screw and bolt meticulously installed by hand.
The employee, proudly showing off the robot, grinned at Eight.
“Dr. Eight, we would like you to implant a soul into this robot.”
It was an incredibly interesting piece of research. If he had known about it beforehand, he would have accepted even without any payment.