The Record of Unusual Creatures

Nolan would not be in the air for a while, neither would the urban infrastructure of the UAV fleet reach the barren planet. But with thousands of probes in the atmosphere and Nolan’s own powerful array of antennas scanning through a sea of information, Hao Ren still gathered a lot of information about the planet.

The fact that the First Born’s ‘brain nucleus went offline’ was basically an unambiguous fact. Whether the underlying cause was a brain lesion, a loss of consciousness, or some powerful neurosuppressive factors (such as a super-powered lullaby generator poking at his brain nerves), all the primordial tissues of the First Born on the planet had surely lost control. After collecting tentacles behavior patterns on the planet’s surface and scanning a map of nerve impulses beneath the planet’s crust, Nolan determined that only the most basic conditioning and self-defense abilities remained. It fought back when it was attacked, activated emergency regeneration mechanisms when it’s damaged, and changed its physiological structure when the environment changed, but all of this was done only by the basic conditioning of the tentacles, which fully explained why the bombing by the rebel forces provoked only a ‘limited response’ from the First Born, rather than devastating retaliation.

On the other side, the survivors living on the moon and in space continued to organize a counterattack on the planet. They had a highly structured and efficient militarized society. Relying on continuous industrial support from the lunar base, these survivors had been attacking the tentacles of the First Born on their home planet almost continuously. When Nolan spread her ‘eyes’ around the planet, she saw at least one attack from space every hour, and the bombing that Hao Ren saw was actually the smallest of those attacks. The rebels did not just use bombers, they also used a variety of tactics to remove tentacles that kept popping up from the planet, usually carpet bombing by dropping guided bombs from the stratosphere or firing orbital bombs directly from the Zenith.

But Nolan found that the most effective way was still to use bombers for near-suicidal point-blank drops — because attacks from higher altitudes were rarely effective against tentacles.

It’s not that it’s not powerful enough, but the First Born’s tentacles were more defensive against attacks from a greater distance. It seemed that although the First Born had lost his wits, his ‘conditioning’ was still different from that of ordinary life. Those tentacles still had a degree of advanced judgment. Ultra-long-range strikes from orbit were blocked by various force fields before they arrived but suicide bombing by bombers at very close range avoided the ‘judgment mechanism’ of tentacles.

This tug of war had been going on for years but Hao Ren was sure that the exiles from space were still far from dawn.

They might have hit the planet as hard as they could, lighting up dozens of battlefields every day. In Nolan’s planetary surveillance images, the red triangles that represented ‘war zones’ could be seen around the planet. While such an attack might destroy a normal planetary civilization, it would not fundamentally destroy a mythical creature. The First Born’s tentacles were repaired and regenerated day and night, sometimes faster than they could be blown up, and the tentacles on the surface of the planet were only a fraction of the size of this mythical creature. His true identity was buried deep in the planet’s mantle, which was impervious to any threat from the rebels.

He was not subdued by mortals, he just did not fight back.

On the morning of the sixth day on the planet, Nolan repaired all of the communication modules and some of its weapons systems of the spaceship while trying to activate her main engine. The engine was not completely repaired, but its main structure had been regenerated, and Nolan thought it was time to test it for the first time.

“We should be able to launch tomorrow,” Nolan said, apparently in a better mood after completing the test. She changed back to the 1:1 hologram and reported to Hao Ren on the bridge. “It’s not back to full strength, but it has at least 70-80% combat effectiveness.”

“That’s quite good.” Hao Ren nodded heartily. “After all, you were almost blown up into two…”

Nolan’s face crumpled at this. “Can you please stop stressing that…”

Hao Ren ignored her and turned to the large holographic projection in the center of the bridge to adjust the image to the observation of the lunar base. “In fact, there’s one thing I still don’t understand… We didn’t hide anything when we landed on this planet, and I’m sure you could see it from space, so the people who live on the space station and on the lunar base must have known about us, but why haven’t they done anything yet?”

“It’s kind of weird,” Nolan said, nodding. “An alien spaceship of unknown origin that ‘crashed’ in its own home is a problem that cannot be ignored by any means. But…”

Nolan suddenly stopped talking. Hao Ren looked at her curiously and asked, “What’s wrong?”

Nolan blinked. “The robot woke up… I mean it’s fixed.”

“Which… Oh, you mean the one in the lab?” Hao Ren immediately threw the topic aside and shouted, “Call the others and go to the lab now!”

The prediction data given by the laboratory mainframe was very accurate indeed. The robot had been lying on the maintenance workbench for exactly forty-eight hours and the maintenance work had just finished on time. It was the best news of the day.

Hao Ren tried to collect debris from other bombing sites in the past two days, but he did not get anything. Without Nolan’s support, his range of activities on the planet was limited. There had been only three rebel attacks and crashes in that limited area over the past two days. The crash sites were in a mess. There were a lot of scattered metal fragments, and none of the crew debris could be recovered.

The First Born’s counterattack was fierce and merciless. Most of the wreckage that fell to the ground was debris, and Lily’s encounter with the robot girl was a stroke of luck.

So the robot girl lying in the lab was Hao Ren’s only hope.

The robot girl was lying quietly on the workbench. Nolan had already asked the autonomous bot to dress her in a female crew uniform in advance (the kind Lily wore on the spaceship). Now she had complete hands and feet, her skin intact, and her biomimetic skin making her look like a healthy teenage girl.

Her eyes were closed, her long black hair spread out on the workbench, and her pale face was like a sculpted work of art but lifeless. She was still in a dormant state for the time being, but with one command, she could open her eyes.

“It’s not a complete fix. In fact, more than half of her structure is definitely not what it was when she left the factory,” Nolan explained. “The analysis engine was unable to ‘guess’ what the missing parts might have looked like from scratch, so it had to create substitutes based on what remained of her torso, including limbs and a portion of her power circuit. To ensure balance, her remaining arm was thrown away directly. Although it’s a substitute, it should work well on her. The analysis engine studied her control module and wrote the drivers for all the body components according to her own logic circuits, so she will feel like her new models are as good as they used to be…Probably.”

“Probably?” Hao Ren could not help but cover his forehead. “Forget it. Turn it on first.”

The platform buzzed slightly, and the boot command was fed into the robot girl’s core circuit via an external cable. The robot girl’s body quivered slightly, and after a strange ‘beep’, the robot opened her eyes.

A circle of heads formed a circle in her field of vision.

“Ow ow, she’s awake!”

“…I’m going to take it apart with a screwdriver if she can’t wake up…”

“Why doesn’t she talk? Nolan, are you sure you got her a speaker?”

“She’s using a more sophisticated voice device…”

“Stop making noises y’all.” Vivian shut them up, and then turned to the robot girl lying on the workbench and asked, “What’s your name?”

N-6 turned her eyes and looked at the humans in astonishment…