We climbed another hill. We went down another hill. After a small mound, if there was another hill to climb, I was determined to turn back because we had been walking for hours.
"The Dermovoxes also looked like troublesome creatures."
"What do you mean?"
"They were created to be weapons and they look incredibly deadly. Do you think the Colonies could have been successful in the war against the Supreme World Republic if they had them earlier?"
"Don't make me laugh!" Hulk said, stroking his belly. "Maybe the Dermovoxes could be superior against some robot models of the SWR. They might even be able to conduct some ground battles better than the incredibly large armies made up of those robots. After all, they are more flexible, smarter, and know the battlefield better... But fighting the SWR is not just fighting on the ground. The SWR has bases on water planets, they even have a space base established between two stars. They have bases on satellites, underground, on rogue planets, and in atmospheres with incredibly difficult conditions. And most of these bases serve as barracks. Without capturing these bases, capturing the SWR would be just a dream. And the Dermovoxes cannot be evolutionarily sufficient to capture those bases. Let's say they are evolutionarily sufficient for one or two of them. But for all of them... I don't think so. First of all, it's impossible to transport an army to a base on any planet of the SWR. In short, it's almost impossible to transport the Dermovoxes to those planets. They can infiltrate your computers with advanced technology and blow up your ships remotely. If you're going to fight the SWR, finding a system that allows you to fly in space outside of the SWR's control should be your main priority."
"So, in short, you're saying the Colonies wouldn't have won even with the Dermovoxes."
"The SWR was not as developed back then as it is now, but my answer is still yes... Yes, the Colonies would not have won. As far as I understand, the Dermovoxes were intended to be created to protect the colonists from the SWR's raids. Not to raid the SWR."
"What if the Colonies had a lot more alien races like the Dermovoxes? What if one alien race could fight in space and another alien race could fight in the sea..."
"Are you asking what would happen if different armies made up of different aliens were formed?"
"Yes..."
"It would be difficult for them to win, but I can't say it's impossible. I can say it's one level below impossible. Anyway, no one has the time, budget, or power to form such an army. Besides... Besides, even imagining forming such an army is beyond madness. I'm telling you this as a geneticist and a creature expert."
When we climbed the last hill, I felt like I was breathing out of my ass. Maybe I hadn't pushed my condition this hard even during the passionate night I spent with Lara, but after hours, we had succeeded. We had succeeded in seeing something other than tombstones.
"Where the f*ck is the science facility!" I shouted, out of breath. Because what we found in front of us was not a science facility, but on the contrary, a humble mountain cabin. "This is a setup!"
The soil around the mountain cabin had turned into a purplish color that was close to black. This purple soil was broken up with cables that were sprouting out of the ground from time to time. Smoke was coming out of the mountain cabin's tiled chimney, but the rising smoke was not real, it was made of holograms. The wooden walls of the mountain cabin were removed, its door was broken, and its windows were shattered.
"Do you think the facility could be inside this house?" I asked Hulk in a whisper: "After all, the cables seem to be coming here."
"Inside this haunted house?"
"Where did you get that it's haunted?"
"Can't you see? A mountain cabin in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by tombstones, what else could it be but haunted?"
"Look at what you're saying! I thought you were a scientist."
"I'm saying this because I am a scientist. You'd be surprised if you knew how easy it is to create a creature that eats people, can hide in the dark and become invisible when necessary, and looks terrifying."
"So what are we going to do? Are we not going into the house then?"
"No... We will. But you'll go in first."
When we got to the door, I thought I'd take a peek inside through the broken pieces of wood. If a face, an eye, a mouth suddenly appeared from between those broken pieces, I would probably leave my soul there and the last mortal in the universe would have truly died.
But when I put my eye through the broken pieces of wood, I saw a cybernetic human sitting at a table; carving wood with his metal fingers, with hair long enough to reach his knees. Yes... Maybe it was one of the last things I expected to be waiting in a mountain cabin. I didn't want to wait any longer. I was close to retirement. So I straightened my uber-super-cool space suit, deepened my voice, and started knocking on the door.
"Greetings... We are from BEDK. We received a... What did we get, Hulk?"
"A motion... A warning..."
"No, it was another word..."
"Could it be a report, boss?"
"Ah... I remember. We received a report. We received a report that there is a science facility on this planet that requires approval. With your permission, we would like to ask you a few questions."
No sound came from inside the house. I looked through the broken pieces of wood once more. The cybernetic man was still sitting at his table, busy carving the pieces of wood.
"Okay then," I shouted toward the door. "We're coming in!"
I entered through the door and started walking slowly toward the table. Hulk was constantly trying to get close to me like a child holding his mother's skirt. Yes, a house in the middle of a mountain was scary. I even shivered a little more when I realized that the inside of this house was lit with fake candles, but... But what was standing in front of us was a powerless, maybe a little crazy, helpless Cybernetic.
Let me talk a little more about this cybernetic sitting in a metal chair. As I said, he had hair that reached his knees, and since the tips fell to the other side of the table, they were not visible. From between this long, face-covering hair, his reddish-stained eye was visible; and that eye did not leave the carved woods on the table for even a second. The man had a lot of figurines on his table. The man was making these figurines with the index finger of his left metallic hand. The index finger was sharper than his other fingers. This meant that the man had sharpened his index finger just to be able to carve.
Then, when I looked around, I realized that the wood needed to make so many carved figurines was collected from the surroundings. It would be quite strange for there to be no furniture in such a large room, wouldn't it? This Cybernetic had probably started using the furniture in the house as a resource when the wood in his hands ran out; and when that didn't seem enough, he must have started on the walls of the house. Only then did the broken wooden walls and door of the house become understandable.
We had entered the room, surveyed the surroundings, and even made a lot of noise with the creaking floorboards as we stepped on the wooden floor, but the Cybernetic man still had no reaction. He continued to carve the wood in front of him with his thumb in a nonchalant manner.
The tabletop was filled with piles of figurines. Considering the man's speed of carving, he had probably been standing here for centuries. This, of course, was not our problem. I was going to save some visuals with Telkam and upload them to the phone system, and after giving my approval, I was going to head to my cave.
"There's no science facility here, is there?" I asked. Still no answer.
"Oh my! Am I going to deal with you?" I thought to myself and started touching the temple of my helmet to take pictures. First, I took a picture of the man, then the walls, and then the outside through the window... I was taking a picture of the figurines on the table last when I noticed something. Something strange...
The statues were incredibly realistic. Everything from the tassels on their clothes to the facial expressions was in its place. This wood carver, no matter how long he had been doing this job, had truly become an expert at it. Each figurine was in character as if it were on a stage. They were reenacting a scene in groups and each one looked incredibly happy. Except for one group of figurines...
There was a man, a woman, and a little girl in this unhappy group. The man was in a military uniform. His face was not carved, but "guilty" was written on his blank face. The little girl, another figurine with a cute dress on, had her head detached and her body was full of holes as if it were full of wounds. The woman, another figurine, had incredibly stylish business clothes and looked dead from her facial expression. She had a dull, lifeless facial expression.
These three figurines had moved away from all these groups as another group and were definitely not trying to reenact any theater scene. At that moment, I put my head out from the side of the man's arm and looked at the figurines in more detail. I now noticed that there was a small mound under each figurine and their names were written on those mounds. The woman's name was written as Yorleny. The little girl's was Maria. And the male soldier's name was Edgard.
"Edgard? Isn't Edgard my name? What about Maria? Yes... I had heard her name in these personality simulations. Damn it, what's going on here?"
Then I started looking at the other group. A group of soldiers had set up camp and seemed to be having an extremely fun night. The names of the people in this group were, respectively; Lee, Hanna, İsmail, Bunny, Oscar, Dante, Raiden, Po, Joe, Oliver, Rudy, Polly. Even Edgard was among the figurines, carved once more. Lee was playing with his phone. Hanna, a short-haired woman, was cleaning her rifle. İsmail was juggling grenades by throwing them in the air and catching them. Bunny was aiming a heavy machine gun at Raiden. Raiden was acting as if he had surrendered with the samurai sword in his hand. Oscar was a little away from the campfire and was sitting with his back to the spaceships. Oscar and Polly, a beautiful bespectacled engineer woman, were having a heated conversation. Oliver and a woman named Rudy were trying to adjust a computer with headphones in their ears. A man named Dante was sitting by the fire while Edgard was under his arm again. His face was also scribbled out where it should have been: "Guilty" was written.
"These... These names... Yes! All of these names were in the simulation of my computer. What does this mean? Am I really this Edgard? Why is my face scribbled out and 'guilty' written? What's happening?"
Then I started watching the other figurines. Doctor Lara, Ronald Coldwer, Director Lehstorm, my father Marcin Grom, Arthur Vale... All these people were being kept at a distance without having entered a role. Compared to the others, these did not seem to be carved as skillfully.
"Memory is a strange thing," the Cybernetic said, interrupting my thoughts. His first two words came out with an incredibly great pain. He seemed to be getting used to talking slowly, probably because he hadn't spoken for a long time. "Memory requires evidence. It's not like an experience. If a person is skilled enough, they can close their eyes and experience flying."
I didn't know what to say. I was speechless after what I saw. I wouldn't interrupt this man's speech, I would listen. But the man had paused for so long that I thought he wouldn't speak at all.
"The brain is so misleading. We can get things that have not been experienced as an experience. Isn't that a very terrifying thing? It's so creepy that it makes you question the nature of reality."
"What do you mean?"
"I'm talking about how misleading experiences can be. Especially in an age of technology like this. If experiences are this misleading, then what are we going to trust?" he said and that moment he took the piece of wood he was carving and put it in front of me.
It was a man in an inspector's uniform with a bag in his hand and... And he looked exactly like me. "Arthur." was written under this piece of wood. But I was sure my name was Edgard. Very strange things were happening and I didn't seem to have the intelligence to comprehend what was happening. So did the man put that figurine in front of me on purpose? Did he really know that I resembled the person in that figurine? Because I was in a space suit and I had a high-tech helmet on my head. He shouldn't have been able to see me. Could all of this be a coincidence?
Since Hulk couldn't reach the table, he couldn't know what was on the table; he could only hear what the man was saying, which seemed to make him even more nervous.
"What are we going to trust?" I asked just so the man would continue talking. The man's metal jaw creaked and the smile on his face became readable from between his long hair.
"We will trust memories. Memories require evidence. Memories require a witness." He took the figurine he put in front of me and took it to the back. He put it in another group. There were a lot of names there too, but I couldn't read them because they were in the dark. "Experiences are what make us who we are. And it is memories that make an experience real. That's why a good relationship must be established between memories and experiences. But memories have a bad habit. While experiences may be difficult to lose because they are neurologically ingrained in the brain, and maybe even in genetics, unlike experiences, memories can be easily lost."
"Our boss knows this very well. He acts as if his memory has gone up his ass," Hulk said, and I kicked him with the back of my foot.
"So what are these statues?" I asked to change the subject.
"My little pastime during my 200 years of captivity to keep my memories..."
"So why are you here?"
Once again, the metal jaw creaked and the smile came out from between that long hair in an undeniable way.
"I made a wrong decision as a leader," he said and pointed with his hand at Dante and Edgard, who were arm in arm by the campfire. "Actually, it was good at the beginning." He put his hand next to the group of figurines lined up around the campfire and started tapping a rhythm. "We were an incredibly professional, incredibly powerful team. A team that respected each other and had an incredible love for each other... We were doing the dirty work of the SWR. They were so dirty that if one of them were to come out, maybe there would be no such thing as the Supreme World Republic. "
"So you were an armed organization of the SWR? A secret armed organization..."
"Yes, we carried all the sins of the Supreme World Republic on our backs. They were such sins that if you learned one of these secrets of the Supreme World Republic, you might want to shoot yourself tomorrow. But as a team, we were holding up well. Yes... We had a lot of losses. We had a lot of people who gave up, a lot of people who lost their minds. But we were never completely destroyed. Until the Incompatibles..."
"The Incompatibles? That strange alien race... What happened to them..."
The Cybernetic in front of me was trying to speak, but something was constricting his vocal cords, preventing him from speaking. After struggling to speak for a while in pain, he fell silent and said:
"The arrival of the Incompatibles made the SWR panic. Then..."
He couldn't speak once more. He couldn't say it. No matter how much he strained, no word came out of his mouth.
"The number of sins increased. People were deceived... And... Death... Lies... War..." He had started trembling badly now. The table was also shaking with the man, and the statues on the table were falling one by one. He threw his hand at one of the statues, showed it to me and said: "Where did our sins bring us?"
The statue he showed was the headless Maria statue. As he held this statue in his trembling hand toward my face, I suddenly realized that a small memory in my memory was starting to take its place with a great pain.