29. Fire Drunk
Looking down at the surface of Venus, a strange association suddenly came to mind.
That famous villain character whose face is half-burned while the other half remains unblemished. The light and shadow were sharply divided, as if the sphere of Venus itself was a being that embraced the duality of scorching heat and stark silence.
I gazed absently at the bizarre landscape, feeling somehow like a tourist.
Then, I noticed a scent, coming from nowhere, that stung my nose.
The village fields—the area once called the memory chip fields—had been engulfed by the great fire and were still burning.
It was the smoke rising from it.
The smoke had a pale, ash-like purple tint, not a harsh color, but one that held a mysterious, profound atmosphere. It rose slowly, gently, and undulatingly, changing shape as if a genie were emerging from a magic lamp.
And that smoke was as quiet as fog, gradually approaching the Venusian atmosphere at a leisurely pace, as if trying not to alert anyone to its presence.
As for me, I had no flight capability. I had only ascended this high, pushed up by the shockwave that erupted from the third eye of the inferno below. That propulsion had run out, and my ascent stopped at an altitude more befitting space than Venus.
Then, the descent finally began.
It was similar to the moment a roller coaster reaches the apex of its parabola and starts to plummet.
With a sense of bottomlessness, as if not just my body but my consciousness was slipping away, I fell.
My chassis became encased in scorching heat due to friction with Venus's dense atmosphere.
The heat was like falling while engulfed in flames.
But what afflicted me more deeply than the heat was an intense nausea-like discomfort. My internal wiring was tangled like a kitten's plaything, and signals and data that should have flowed smoothly were turbulent and misdirected throughout my body. Each actuator screamed, and my entire being cried out with nausea.
The cause was clear.
It was that unknown, enigmatic smoke rising from the burning memory chip fields.
Each particle was packed with a colossal amount of data that a normal memory chip could never handle. I instinctively knew that this volume of information was overwhelming my CPU and causing a system crash.
This was dangerous.
I decided to force a part of my consciousness into a sleep state to block the data access from the smoke. Despite the emergency of plummeting as a fireball towards the Venusian surface, I had to protect at least the core.
Following the Pareto principle, I frantically operated the system to put only the core components essential for survival—about twenty percent of the total chip groups—to sleep.
And—that was a mistake.
My judgment backfired.
Perhaps it's the nature of existence, but the result was the exact opposite of what I predicted. If humanoid robots could dream—by the way, I have never once dreamt, and entering sleep mode is rare for me—I should have completely shut down all functions, ignoring the Pareto principle.
By leaving a mere twenty percent partially awake, I was struck by a situation I literally "never dreamed of," or rather, experienced the phenomenon of "dreaming" for the first time in my life.
The moment eighty percent of my chips, sensors, and actuators went to sleep, the smoke, which had been just a mist until then, suddenly assaulted me with the density of a tsunami.
Like a drowning victim abruptly thrown into the water, I struggled, using the few remaining connection circuits and sensors. But the more I struggled, the denser the fluid became, wrapping around and constricting my entire body like a vine or a massive snake.
Then, an inexplicable phenomenon occurred.
My olfactory sensors should have been included in the sleep domain, as they were deemed non-essential for survival, yet I was suddenly confronted by a "smell." No, should I call it a "scent"?
It was impossible.
A sense that should have been non-functional was being forcibly excited.
It was as if some entity had hacked into the remaining twenty percent area and creatively woven a new perceptual circuit from it.
"Would you like a smell of this?"
It was the scent of a "voice"—like a beautifully dangerous sorceress humanoid whispering seductively in my ear.
Smelling a voice.
I accepted it not through logic, but through instinct.
I felt I had to desperately pretend to accept the unknown phenomenon, lest I fall into an abyss of endless terror.
The descent accelerated along with the seductive-scented voice.
My chassis had somehow lost its human shape, becoming a mass of red-hot metal, charting a direct course toward the village, like a meteorite thrown by a god.
The scent of the voice grew exponentially more intense.
As everything deviated from the logical realm, I marshaled the meager remnants of my reason and threw a search query.
"What is the identity of this smoke?"
Despite my high-speed plunge, the high-performance corporate AI instantly grasped my intent and returned a plausible answer:
"This is a Poppy."