But yet again her thoughts were interrupted. The emergency alarm alerting the whole facility to an enemy presence started to ring. Why? 10H thought. Why did the system think there was an intruder in section two? Pod and her were the only ones here.
She was confused, but she knew why in the back of her mind. 10H ran to lock the door separating Section Two from Section One.
The hundreds of Pods in this facility shared the same consciousness. They were different units from the one that had just attacked her, but their programming was identical. That meant that any Pod that came in here would attack 10H. The alarm wasn’t a mistake.
She heard pounding from the other side of the now-locked door. The pods were probably throwing themselves against it. The jarring noise hurt her wounds. 10H grimaced and cowered in fear.
Now, there was no turning back inside the facility. The other door opened into the ocean. Ocean water 10,000 meters deep, at that. She had two choices. To be crushed by 1,001 hectopascals of pressure, or be burnt by the lasers from hundreds of Pods …
“I don’t want either.”
But it wasn’t like she could stay still. She held her charred side, and started to walk toward the door leading into the ocean.
Pod was hiding something. And that something lay on the other side of this door. If she was going to die, she wanted to at least know what it was. She wanted to burn the image of it into her cornea before she died.
Although she might get crushed by water before that happened.
The moment she touched the spindle-shaped door handle, her fingers bounced off with a zap.
“Why?”
She looked back and forth between her fingers, which were burnt by an electric current, and the spindle-shaped door handle.
“That’s weird. That’s definitely weird.”
Why was there a trap like this on the inside of the door? It would make sense if it was on the outside of the door, to deter enemies. But this made it seem like …
10H grabbed the handle again. Her hand burned. But she still spun the handle. The pain and heat made her vision go red. Her lips trembled. She didn’t know what she was screaming.
The lever opened. She finally understood why the black mark was there. Someone had tried to open the door before, and kept on going as it burned their hand. The mark was the residue from that.
The lock was off. All she had to do was press a button to open the door. One push would … be the end of her.
She didn’t have time to hesitate. The door to Section One was about to be compromised. 10H pressed the button. The door opened.
She didn’t feel the sensation of being crushed. In fact, just the opposite. She felt a strong pull sucking her outside.
The sound of rushing wind only lasted for a second. Tranquility took its place immediately.
Her momentum sent her rolling on the ground. Grimacing in pain, she stood up. Rising sand obscured her vision.
“Sand? What? What’s this?”
Her voice sounded strangely muffled. She must’ve damaged her vocal or auditory mechanisms when she fell. Her visual mechanisms seemed like they were defective as well.
Everywhere she looked, there was not a drop of water. Looking up, she saw a black sky, and the occasional stars that dotted it.
“No way …”
She couldn’t believe her eyes. In front of her, in the black sky, was a floating blue sphere. It was Earth. Which meant that …
“Is this the moon?”
The moment she said those words it all made sense. There had been many tricks to make sure she never noticed the obviously weaker lunar gravity, which was a sixth of Earth’s. YoRHa androids weighed about 150 kilograms, and ambulated thanks to extremely strong artificial muscles. Her control programs must have been rewritten.
The cups with lids, and magnets affixed to the soles of her shoes as well as the bottoms of the chess pieces— they were all to prevent 10H from realizing the difference between the gravity she expected and the gravity she experienced.
This wasn’t 10,000 meters below sea level. The facility wasn’t underwater at all. It was surrounded by sand and a soundless darkness.
What was I doing? What was I being forced to do?
She thought quicker than she had ever thought before. The pointlessly large hatch room, and complicated layout of the facility. The server room and broadcasting room. The on the air sign came to mind.
While that sign was lit, she was prohibited from entering the broadcasting room. Thinking back, that was strange. If it was just a broadcast, it wouldn’t matter who was in the room. Yet 10H was prohibited.
This facility wasn’t an intermediary station to keep the location of the original transmission a secret, this was actually where the transmissions were created. Everything fell into place.
Here, they didn’t manage backup data, but instead the data of the human board. That was the secret that the Pods were keeping from her. And inside this white facility, there were only hundreds of Pods and her, so …
The human board doesn’t exist. That means … humans don’t exist anymore? Is that what it means? That is what it means.
Her legs gave out. 10H sat down right there. Sand rose silently around her. She was in danger of being crushed by a pain that wasn’t coming from her wounds.
She felt the presence of Pods. Hundreds of Pods chased her.
Type B’s were skilled at combat. If a Type D were to initiate a defensive battle, it would be problematic. A Type S would sniff out the truth. That was the reason. That’s why she, a Type H, was selected to be the supervisor of this facility.
Even still, after a long time, 10H uncovered the truth. She was able to make it outside, sustaining damage to her hands in the process. She was quickly caught, and had her memory erased. That’s why she had to resort to leaving a message in a normally unused part of her brain, which could only be accessed by herself.
The Pods surrounded 10H. This was it, but she wasn’t scared. Her memories would be erased, and she would return to performing the same monotonous tasks every day. Her shock and sadness from realizing the extinction of humans would surely be erased without a trace.
“It’s my loss. I give up. I won’t give you any trouble.”
She raised her hands. She let herself be restrained, and closed her eyes.
Just before her consciousness was sucked into darkness, 10H heard Pod’s words.
“How unfortunate. This is the forty-sixth time.”