Short, Light, Free
chapter-8

Ten years later, the rocket landed on the energy planet as scheduled.

The rocket cabin began to warm up again and the girl woke up from her cryosleep and crawled out of the room.

She slammed onto the ground, her limbs trembling.

Her whole body was numb and powerless. A good twenty minutes passed before she could get up on her feet.

With her uncoordinated limbs, she staggered toward the main cabin.

The dashboard indicated that there was oxygen outside but just to be safe, the girl brought along a filtering apparatus.

After putting on a lightweight spacesuit, she gently pushed a button.

The door opened up slowly.

A barren land filled with red rock piles entered her field of vision.

She attempted to walk out the door.

She looked around and recorded her location.

Her body had grown half a foot during that ten years and she was now five foot seven.

She had a hard time adapting.

Everything seemed normal as she explored the planet.

Like Mars, it had an uneven surface.

After walking some distance, the girl tripped.

Turning around, she noticed the corner of a scrap iron that was buried under a lump of loess.

After half a day and much effort, she finally managed to dig out all four chunks of machinery.

Upon a closer look, she realized that these rusted chunks made up the body of a gunner.

She also found some strange limbs, most likely belonging to the extraterrestrial insects.

After some tests, she picked out the functioning components.

The girl started assembling them together in hope to model a complete gunner.

Two days went by.

Whenever she got hungry, she would return to the rocket to get some food and catch some sleep before continuing on the repairs.

She successfully reactivated the gunner on the third night.

The gunner stood up slowly but had too little charge, as reflected on the instrument in her hand.

She brought the gunner back to the rocket and by now, his battery was approaching zero.

She relied on the rocket’s accumulator to charge the gunner up, intending to rely on him to cover and explore a greater distance.

On the way, she saw a lone insect.

From approximately fifteen yards away, the insect darted toward the girl.

Under her control, the gunner mercilessly fired at the insect down until the girl calmed him down.

After using up more than half of the gunner’s ammunition, the girl realized that it wasn’t wise to waste ammunition like that.

Three more days passed.

After some exploration, she learned that she was in a destructed human base camp.

The facilities were considered wholesome. She managed to restore the electrical power.

However, the main monitor was already severely damaged and the buttons were mostly not working properly.

In the storehouse, she found twenty gunners that had yet to be set up and activated.

The girl compiled their codes and organized them into teams.

She charged them up.

She brought the gunners along with her to retrieve her rocket and place it in the camp base.

There was a cabin ecology in the base camp and potatoes grew densely.

Perhaps that was a good start.

With twenty gunners, she surveyed the surroundings.

Some components of these gunners had grown rusty, which affected their movements slightly.

Whenever damaged components rendered them immobile, the girl would conduct some basic repairs.

The filtering apparatuses started to run out, leaving her with no choice but to breath the planet’s oxygen.

She coughed violently upon inhaling her first breath.

Following that, she felt nothing else and decided to remove her spacesuit.

Although her spacesuit was lightweight, it was still burdensome.

Just like that, she traversed the battleground of the war between the gunners and extraterrestrial insects.

The girl conducted thorough inspections on every single gunner in hope of finding that particular gunner from a decade ago.

She wasn’t so lucky this time.

She was attacked by a group of insects from all sides.

The densely packed insects crawled downslope, effectively surrounding her.

The girl fought them off calmly with her perfectly programmed teams.

The twenty gunners were godsent.

But problems resurfaced.

Some gunners started losing coordination.

The moment one got captured by an insect, over ten of these bugs would pounce on and destroy him.

The girl looked around and saw a small cave.

WIthout any other choice, she brought the remaining gunners inside to take cover.

The gunners stationed themselves at the cave mouth and started shooting at the incoming insects in teams of two.

More and more insect corpses piled up at the cave entrance.

But the girl also knew that they were running out of ammunition.

The girl sat down against the wall, thinking that she was done for.

Because she wasn’t in a spacesuit, she could clearly feel something pricking her bottom.

Feeling the pain, she looked underneath her.

It was a piece of plastic.

Turning on her mobile phone’s torch, she saw a notebook that had been ripped apart.

There was no network adapter card and no microphone.

Was this how he had managed to go online?

There were also some other components remaining: a loudspeaker, hard disk, and computer memory.

The girl gained access to the hard disk through her mobile phone.

She was astonished to find important data within.

Alpha waves could actually wreck the insects’ brains.

The girl tightened her grip on the loudspeaker and mumbled, “Please work.”

She dismantled a gunner and modified it into a portable megaphone.

She activated a computer sequence and programmed temporary alpha waves.

The music blared out.

The girl pushed the gunners stationed at the cave mouth away.

The insects came pouring into the cave.

She shut her eyes.

The next moment, when she opened them, the insects about two meters away from her started collapsing.

The girl was wild with joy. Making her way through the densely packed corpses, she brought the remaining six gunners back to the camping ground.

She ripped off whatever loudspeakers she could find and installed them into the gunners’ bodies.

She then reprogrammed the alpha waves.

They were now louder and more far-reaching.

With her remodeled robots, she went off in search for that particular gunner.

The results were clear. Insects as far as twenty meters away would die upon hearing the soundwaves.

The hard disk in her hand contained detailed positions and maps of all military bases around.

She made use of these operation bases to charge her robots.

The search went on for a year.

Finally, under a pile of ruins, she spotted an odd looking gunner.

At the back of his head hid a network adapter card.

Ecstatic, she dismantled the gunner before her.

She extracted a CPU, unable to contain her joy.

She brought the CPU back to the first military base in which she had parked her rocket.

She overrode the computer sequence that came with the rocket and reprogrammed it to extinguish its fire after a short burst.

Following that, she instilled her temperament into the rocket, just like how the old computers simulated a supercomputer.

She had made a copy of herself within the rocket’s computer system.

She then connected the gunner’s CPU to the rocket and watched as the rocket shot up into the sky.

The girl coughed and blood came out of her mouth.

The air on the planet was slightly poisonous and the girl had been aware of this fact all along.

After over a year of going without the filtering apparatus, the poison had become incurable.

But it was worth it. To her.

The rocket left the planet and reached orbit.

Its fire had been extinguished but its internal computer sequence continued running as if the girl had created a revolving city.

A city that floated in the universe.

The fuel within could run the city for a very, very long time.

“Where am I? The insects are biting me…” the gunner surveyed his surroundings.

It was a small town, its air fresh and scenery beautiful.

“What insects… are you playing with me again, uncle?” the girl spoke from behind.

“I remember you,” the gunner broke into a smile.

“Wait, how am I speaking without any loudspeaker?” he asked doubtfully.

At this point, the gunner possessed the appearance of an uncle.

“Why that goofy laugh? What did you tell me that day?” she asked.

“I… I like you…” the gunner confessed, his smile widening.

“Me too…” the girl admitted.

“Oh right, uncle. I like you, but what’s your name?” she added.

“Name… I don’t have one,” the gunner answered.

“I’m Eve. I’ll call you Adam.” The girl smiled happily.