33. The Sulfuric Acid River
There was no time to be bewildered by the sudden proposal.
Rin forcibly grabbed my hand as I sat on the picnic blanket and pulled me up.
Still holding my hand, she started running, dragging me along. We left the garden, exited the property, and were taken somewhere.
Just before we started running, several cherry blossoms—now transformed into pitiful beetles after being showered in Ammonite's lubricant—clung to my body. As if pleading, "Please return us to our beautiful original forms."
I brushed them off like dust, distancing them from myself, and threw a telepathic message at them.
"Beetles are cool too, you know."
I ran, pulled by Rin.
We seemed to be running through the village, but something was wrong.
Buildings had collapsed, and the landscape was devastated. It looked like the aftermath of a war, or perhaps ruins.
"Did something happen to the village?"
When I asked, Rin answered in a bouncy voice without looking back.
"There was a big fire."
"...A fire?"
"Yeah. An arson incident in the poppy fields. It's settled down now, though."
"Settled down? More like..."
Dumbfounded, I looked around at the disastrous state of the village we were running through.
It looked less like a village and more like the bottom of a giant incinerator.
There were virtually no intact houses left.
Along the streets, forcibly shut-down humanoid robots lay scattered, their bodies charred black as if doused in ink.
This was not a situation that could be described softly as "settled down"; it was a scene of complete collapse, or rather, annihilation.
What was once a village now lay as a colossal carcass.
"It's okay," Rin said lightly.
"We can rebuild quickly. This village is famous for 'Kesshi,' after all."
"...Kesshi?"
"Yeah. The electro-circuitry drug chips."
"That means..." I gasped. "So, it's narcotics."
"That's right. As long as there are narcotics, the village will revive immediately. Humanoid robots always gather where there is pleasure."
"Pleasure..."
I frowned, unable to agree.
"Can modern, cutting-edge robots be lured by such primitive temptations?"
"Don't you know, Big Brother?"
Rin turned around deftly while running.
"That's the latest trend. Perfectly mimicking the hormonal mechanisms of protein-based life is the current fashion on Venus. In a roundabout way, the era of dopamine has returned."
From there, Rin began a lengthy engineering lecture on how the effects of neurotransmitters like dopamine, serotonin, adrenaline, and even endorphins are materialized on electronic circuits.
I listened to it with one ear like boring background music while silently moving my legs.
Passing through my vision was a gray wasteland.
The golden hues and bewitching purples that once colored this planet had all died out here, leaving only a merciless gray to dominate.
The harsh yet elegant beauty unique to Venus was lost, leaving only a vast expanse of burnt ruins.
Running.
Running, running, running.
Suddenly, being led by this small girl robot, I felt like we were dead souls trying to escape from Purgatory.
The heat of Venus mixed with the screams of cicadas still surviving in the burnt-out ruins, clinging to the actuators in my knees like unpleasant noise.
My legs were heavy as lead, but I endured and kept moving them.
And at the end of what felt like an eternal escape, the scenery abruptly opened up.
We had arrived at Rin's destination.
It was a river.
Unlike the unpaved, desolate village spreading behind us, here there were civilized asphalt roads and guardrails. Beyond that, at the bottom of a cliff covered in vegetation that had escaped the fire, flowed a river.
The river was strangely beautiful.
Emerald green would be the most appropriate description.
The water surface itself was accompanied by a faint luminescence, and countless pale blue particles—like light grains that made nocturnal plankton shine even brighter—floated within it.
They drifted like algae, but far from being dirty, they enhanced the river's mystique.
The particles of light rode the torrent, flowing at tremendous speed.
A scene like a summer resort from another dimension, indifferent to the plight of the ruined village, lay there.
I leaned over the guardrail and looked down.
The river was wide, appearing spacious enough for three five-ton trucks to run side-by-side.
What was bizarre was the riverbank.
On both banks, crystal-like minerals of irregular length and shape stood densely. No, rather than sticking out, it might be more accurate to say they were "growing" from there.
Countless crystals grew along the flow of the river, their tips all sharp and pointed, radiating a menacing beauty like fangs ready to tear apart anyone who approached.
As I got closer, I understood the meaning of this strange forest of crystals.
Impaled on the sharp tips were humanoid robots who had aimed for this river to escape the fire.
There was a considerable height difference between the guardrail and the river surface, forming a sheer cliff. Driven by the flames, they must have tried to jump into the river but lacked the distance, falling onto the cluster of crystals jutting out before the water.
They were pierced at the tip, or skewered through, stopping in gruesome poses.
Faded like discarded industrial products, corpses meeting their eternal shutdown lined the riverbank.
It looked as if all the dead residents of the village had been gathered in this iron graveyard, or perhaps like a tasteless objet d'art built by a mad scientist. It was a gruesome spectacle showing the end of a once-prosperous, now-ruined industrial zone.
It was hardly a place for playing in the river.
But surprisingly, there were earlier visitors playing without a care for the surrounding corpses.
It was a group of humanoids with the appearance settings of high school students, both male and female.
They exuded an innocent atmosphere, like a close-knit group enjoying a perfectly normal summer vacation.
They kicked up the shining water surface, splashing emerald droplets on each other and raising high-pitched laughter.
When a boy threw a beach ball high into the air, a girl chased after it, diving to catch it with a splash.
Under the sun, the sparkling water surface and the figures of the young people created a scene so dazzling it made one forget this was the brink of death, a scene cruelly peaceful.
Rin's eyes sparkled as she blew a soap bubble at me.
"Let's go in too!"
Admittedly, in the sweltering heat, the cool-looking river was attractive. It was true that I was slightly tempted. But I had to confirm a crucial point.
"But how do we get down to the river?"
If we jumped in without thinking, we'd end up skewered on those countless crystals like the others.
Then, two drones flew in from nowhere.
Like a UFO catcher game, they captured Rin and me from above our heads. Extending down were long, three-fingered arms, wrinkled like E.T.'s fingers and a creepy, raw-smelling green. The arms grabbed us firmly, lifted us up, and airlifted us toward the river.
The drones came to a dead stop right at the border between the river and the crystals, and abruptly released Rin and me into the air.
I shuddered.
At this rate, we would be skewered on the crystals.
In contrast to me, falling while screaming pitifully, Rin was shouting with joy.
Splash, with the sound of water, we fell into the river.
The moment my whole body was enveloped in water, I carelessly opened my eyes.
And I screamed underwater.
"Guaaaaaaaah!"
My eyes melted.
This river was not just water.
It was concentrated sulfuric acid.
The lenses of my visual sensors dissolved instantly, and the beautiful emerald scenery was lost forever.
Losing their protective film, the sulfuric acid flowed mercilessly into the empty cavities that were my eye sockets.
The liquid invaded the interior of my skull, beginning to seep into every corner of my electronic circuits.
At this rate, even my CPU would be dissolved.
Is this how I meet my end?
Just as I was about eighty percent resigned, Rin swam over.
Strangely, she kept her eyes wide open in the sulfuric acid as if it were nothing.
She held a pair of swimming goggles in her hand.
She tried to put them on my eyes, but first, the sulfuric acid that had invaded inside my skull had to be removed.
Rin put her mouth to my eye sockets as if performing artificial respiration and sucked out the accumulated sulfuric acid in one go. In the gap created by the momentary vacuum in my sockets, she quickly fitted the goggles.
A miracle occurred.
My eyes, whose lenses and sensors should have melted away, began receiving visual data again through the goggles.
However, the colors of the world were lost.
Like an old black-and-white movie, my entire field of vision had been converted to monochrome.
"I'm sorry, Big Brother..."
She was crying while immersed in the concentrated sulfuric acid.
In the emerald green water, her tears were a vivid red.
So, I knew painfully well that she was crying.
But the tears spilling from her beautiful eyes reacted with the sulfuric acid immediately after, evaporating into golden foam, and began a long journey back to the surface and into the Venusian atmosphere.
"I couldn't restore the color function. It's black and white now, but please bear with it."
"It's enough."
I said from the bottom of my heart.
"Actually, black and white is better, like a film noir. Too colorful is tacky. Sometimes we need to tone it down. Thank you for fixing me."
I expressed my gratitude rather verbosely, but the relief was real.
However, there was one exception.
Red alone was recognized properly as red.
In other words, my current vision had become like the girl in Schindler's List, where only red held color in a monochrome world.
I surfaced, still wearing the transparent, cool-looking underwater goggles Rin gave me.
Then, the earlier visitors—the humanoids with high school settings who were already enjoying the river—swam closer.
They called out with concern.
"Hey! Are you okay!?"