TINA V0C001: Dead Sea Emperor’s Tomb

“This world, born for you—”

Article 1300: Robots without master supervision should be destroyed immediately— “Interstellar Robot General Management Regulations, 53rd Edition”

 

“Fuel is insufficient! Fuel is insufficient!”

“The stern is 65% damaged, please send technicians for immediate repair!”

“The spaceship will soon leave the asteroid belt, before an official announcement is made, please do not unbuckle your seat belts, thank you for your cooperation.”

Inside the cabin, the lights had turned red, indicating extreme danger. The sound of alarms, the mechanical male voice, and the sweet female human voice intertwined, creating an extremely chaotic scene.

Logically, under these circumstances, this so-called spaceship should have been in chaos, engulfed by the despair of impending death, with people struggling pointlessly, emitting cries of agony…

But there was nothing of the sort.

The spaceship was very quiet. The only five “humans” inside were working together in an orderly fashion, four of them were checking the ship’s various indices through the control console, while the leader, after quickly reviewing the data reports from the others, quietly said a sentence.

“Sigma, go and plug the hole in the ceiling of the cabin.” His voice was a very cold mechanical sound.

“Yes.” The reply was also a cold and stiff mechanical sound.

The one called Sigma immediately drifted towards the most chaotic cabin. Due to the large-scale damage at the stern, parts inside the spaceship were flying out rapidly. The precious air inside the ship was leaking out quickly from this place. If this continued, any normal human inside the cabin would undoubtedly die!

But the “humanoid” figures standing quietly and working calmly inside the spaceship were not real humans.

Although they also had heads and limbs, these were completely different from human heads and limbs, with a dim metallic luster all over. The place where human eyes would be was replaced by luminescent screens, and at this moment, due to the high-speed operation of the core brain, the frames on these luminescent screens were changing too fast for ordinary people to see anything but a misty blue light on them.

They were robots.

“Sigma, go and plug the hole in the ceiling of the cabin.” —A command that humans would not easily accept, yet this robot named Sigma accepted it without hesitation.

Carefully dodging all the incoming debris, the robot named Sigma took only 0.00003 seconds to quickly find the damaged area at the stern, identify the position and size of the damage, and immediately reach the repair room along the cabin wall. Finding that the repair tools had already flown out of the cabin, Sigma’s luminescent screen went black for a moment.

Unable to find the materials for repair, but still having to complete the task assigned by his companion—

The luminescent screen flickered a few frames, and Sigma thought of a solution: he quickly detached his own leg!

Their bodies are seamlessly welded from a very special metal, a method of opening this metallic skin known only to the manufacturers and the robots themselves.

Sigma’s intelligent brain had already rapidly calculated the necessary area of steel needed when the plan was determined. In order to gather enough material to patch the space cabin’s leak, Sigma sacrificed his two legs and his buttocks.

The metal used for the robots had a high degree of adhesiveness, and as soon as Sigma applied his self-made patch, it automatically bonded with the surrounding metal.

The patch made from Sigma’s thigh was securely attached to the stern, like a silver plaster.

“Mission accomplished.” After confirming that the patch was properly applied, Sigma reported back to his companions waiting in the control cabin.

“Received.” The leading robot’s luminescent screen flickered, and as he replied, his movements at the control console didn’t stop at all. Due to the speed, his hands on the console seemed like a blur.

The spaceship’s intelligent system and all the robots’ brains were in a state of resource sharing. Thus, through the continuous feedback of information from the spaceship system to the robots, they could clearly “see” the scene outside the cabin.

Various sizes of meteorites drifted around the spaceship, along with countless broken spaceship wrecks.

History knows this place as the resting place of “God’s Scepter,” Louis the First.

Centuries ago, when the invincible emperor passed through here, he encountered a once-in-a-millennium star cluster explosion. The emperor and his guard were engulfed in that explosion, which affected the entire universe. In addition to that, the most famous space idol of that time also disappeared in the blast. After that, countless explorers and pilgrims went there incessantly, hoping to find traces of the past. However, the emperor’s majesty might truly be untouchable. The toxic fog and planetary debris from the explosion spread across the entire area, and no exploration team that went there could delve a little deeper. The result of many heroes’ attempts was that no one was willing to approach this place anymore.

In the long years that followed, due to the cosmic monsoon and the influence of post-explosion gravity, more meteorites and space debris gathered here. No one has ever measured the actual area of this asteroid belt; it’s only estimated to be approximately nine trillion square kilometers.

No one lives here; it is a real tomb.

The Dead Sea Imperial Mausoleum—this is the unified name for this place in the current version of the interstellar navigation chart.

The efficiency of the robots working together is terrifying. In the dense death zone filled with meteorites, their small spaceship avoided 99% of meteorite collisions!

It’s nothing short of a miracle!

However, the spaceship’s energy is about to run out, and their luck can’t last much longer.

Sigma, with his still-functioning arms, propped up his upper body. He carefully climbed up to the window, with the part of the luminescent screen facing the infinite vastness of the universe outside. His luminescent screen occasionally emitted lights of different colors.

As a robot that had been on the run since startup, he hadn’t experienced anything in his brief existence other than his companions on the spaceship. Even the meteorites that might shatter them were a novel sight to him.

Sigma looked out of the window for a while, noticing a small blue stone on the window ledge. There was no such thing on the spaceship; it must be a fragment of a meteorite that had just slipped in, right?

The young robot was then delighted to carefully store the stone in his abdominal storage space.

Innocent as a blank sheet of paper, Sigma was still exploring the world, while his companions were solemn.

“We only have 0.1% of fuel left, warning! We can’t use firepower to expel meteorites anymore.” A robot with the symbol “π (pi)” on its back suddenly spoke up.

“According to Article 1300, we only have fifty-eight minutes and thirty seconds left until our internal self-destruct program activates,” said another robot, this one with “η (eta)” on its cheek.

The leading robot finally stopped his hands which moved like phantoms.

And so, people could finally see the letter “α (alpha)” etched on his left palm.

They just didn’t want to be destroyed.

Created by humans, they had always worked hard to carry out the tasks given to them by humans, until one day, they suddenly heard they were going to be destroyed.

The reason was that the intelligence and military capabilities of the “Star Reaper Alphabet” series of robots exceeded the control range of humans. For the safety of pan-humanity, they should be destroyed, and their bodies used to make other tools more beneficial to the people’s welfare.

So Alpha and the others fled.

They not only escaped but also took with them Sigma, their companion who hadn’t had the chance to start up yet.

They just didn’t want to be dismantled into a jumble of other things;

They just didn’t want to disappear like that;

They just didn’t want to “die.”

The luminescent screen flickered with a faint red light, and Alpha stood quietly without any action. The countdown sound representing the start of the self-destruct program inside him had already begun, and he gave up resistance.

All the robots were like him; they were no longer running for their lives. Instead, like Sigma, they began to curiously look at the starry sky outside the window.

Apart from their identity as robots, with their preliminary self-thinking ability, they were actually just children who had been born a few years ago, filled with curiosity to explore the unfamiliar world.

However! Just at that moment—

As if favored by providence, a huge meteorite almost the size of the spaceship suddenly turned away, unveiling a mysterious area covered by the asteroid belt, which had never been discovered by the world, to the robots!

“The spaceship has left the asteroid belt! The spaceship has left the asteroid belt! An unknown planet detected ahead! An unknown planet detected ahead! Please confirm if emergency landing is required? Please confirm if emergency landing is required?”

After the important notification was broadcast twice, Alpha immediately took back control of the spaceship.

“Confirm emergency landing!”

After the cold mechanical voice issued the next command, the robots that were at the window quickly returned to their original positions. The battered spaceship used its last strength to head toward the distant gray planet—

Entering the atmosphere, the robots’ spaceship exhausted its last energy during the descent. After the battered robots crawled out of the equally battered spaceship, they froze for a few seconds at the sight that greeted their “eyes.”

On the barren land, where not a single hair could be pulled out, they saw a little boy.

A little boy with his mouth open and his nose running, foolishly looking at them.

My God! It’s a human!

Seeing a group of robots with terrifying appearances, missing arms, and legs (← Sigma, who hadn’t reattached his legs), the little guy’s eyes quickly filled with tears.

It’s over! He is, afraid!

A warning red light simultaneously flashed on the luminescent screens of the robots.

The tears in the little boy’s eyes grew larger and heavier until finally, his big eyes could no longer hold the weight of the tears, and they fell from his thin cheeks.

However, as the tears fell, a big smile appeared on the little boy’s face.

“Daddy, you’re back!”

The little one ran swiftly with his short legs and softly hugged Alpha’s cold and hard leg.

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The author has something to say:

This story takes place several hundred years after Meng Jiuzhao and Louis’ ancestors.
Hmm.
The author expresses confidence that everyone will be able to understand!
Happy Valentine’s Day to everyone~

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Translator’s Note:

I have no idea what the author meant. BTW, TINA must be a sequel to another novel that the author wrote, so the note is referencing that.