Novels2Search
Remnants of Scientific Mankind
Chapter 1: Arrival on Al'Arith

Chapter 1: Arrival on Al'Arith

  Within the mountainous regions on one of Al'Arith's continents was the small, multi-race kingdom of Kesiah, with citizens from dragon-newts to goblins, orcs, humans, dwarves, elves, and even dragons themselves. Created from the results of the previous war on the planet, it was considered as a sort of backwater kingdom, away from the politics and strife of the central continent. This kingdom was a rather peculiar place to people in the central continent. Declared as a "kingdom", it was actually a place of near demcoracy.

  The Royal family is in a position akin to a Prime Minister, which ruled for life. A parliament underneath the King handled the day-to-day rulings of this country, while the King and his advisors handled more important matters, such as military affairs and major projects and requests. As a safeguard against the King's potential tyrrany, common soldiers could also appeal to the Parliament or protest peacefully. The Parliament, as known to outsiders, was composed of two "houses", or official factions: the "Nobles" and the "Commoners". No fancy titles are attached, for ease of use. Both held equal amounts of power, creating a balancing act. If the Nobles wanted a coup, they would have to wade through the hordes of Commoners wanting to murder them, and the Royal family too. Conversely, if the Commoners wanted to stage a coup, they would be mowed down by the powerful Nobles and their personal armies, as well as the Royal family. If the Royal family wanted a coup, they would get swarmed by both the Nobles and Commoners. This balance was never upset, because the country was small, and had to deal with the lawless no man's lands and buffer zones around it, which kept crime flooding into their country, even though the neighboring coutnries were allied with them with multiple overlapping alliances. Additionally, if a coup killed enough people, the people behind the coup would lose their will to fight, stopping it in its tracks. People in the Parliament are elected, with the King being descended from the Royal family, regardless of gender.

  The country's small size meant that it had to keep a powerful military force and a permanent police force. The Nobles act as investigators, while the Commoners have an organized police force to keep order, with the Nobles assisting them on investigations. The Royal family keeps a military force to deal with powerful bandits and invaders, as well as dealing with problematic invasions from the mountains by the mountain less-intelligent creatures, such as orcs and goblins. (Although Orcs and Goblins do have their own territories, which are officially regarded as individual countries, their stupider bretheren cannot form languages, only squeaks, and grunts, thus they are considered animals by everyone else, even by the other orcs and goblins).

  Kesiah, in order to appease its multi-racial citizens, created a law that stated that any discrimination of any kind was not allowed, including slavery (which was illegal and highly despised), indentured servitude (which was also despised), racism (also despised), and stereotypes (highly frowned upon by everybody, especially Nobles and the Royal family). It also created specific clauses of citizenship, which are:

1. You must be able to speak and listen to a language outside of "animalistic langauge" (ex: squeaks, grunts, etc.) that had syllables. Even one word of a language, or simply parroting a word back, would work.

2. You must renounce your citizenship with any other coutnry. Countries with friendly relations not withstanding.

3. You must live in this country for five years, and swear to uphold and obey the law of this country (if citizens consider a law discriminatory or objectionable, they lodge complaints with the Parlaiment or one with a government position)

  Kesiah's eocnomy is actually relatively balanced. Due to the nature of buffer zones and no man's lands, trading is usually restricted to internal trade, with the exception of large merchant caravans, which are so heavily armed that they could rival a large army's military might, in roder to fend off bandits and other dangers present. Kesiah is centered in the multiple interconnecting valleys of the Locust mountain range, named for its hot summers and cold winters, and because the interconnecting valleys that span the mountain range look like a locust in mid-flight. These valleys are fertile enough to grow a large variety of livestock and produce, ranging from rice and wheat to special mountainous lviestock and orchard of various kinds. The mountainous regions surrounding the valleys ahve been hollowed out and turned into cities, relying on the lcoal population of dwarves and mining goblins to do the job. Kesiah has no lack of metal, as the nearby mountains are rich enough to supply Kesiah with a nearly inexhuastible amount. As a side effect, Kesiah also uses reinforced brick buildings in nearly every building possible, with rebar-reinforced bricks being a constructional standard. But the lack of an easily accessible food supply left much of the country uninhabited (except for dragons, who prefer the seclusion, and the forest elves, who live in the forests).

  It just so happened that the robot and its frame landed in one of Kesiah's forests, one rearely inhabited by the sentient races.

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  In the dark, green, deciduous forests of Kirsah, a large clearing could be found, filled with the swaying green grasses. No animal could be seen in the tall trees or in the grass, but the occassional rustle and the tuneful call of birds belied that this forest was full of life. But in the center of this clearing was a patch of ground, exactly in the shape of a box, even though there was nothing on it. The natural vitality of Al'Arith's living flora and fauna would mean that this site would immediately be filled to the brim with green, swaying grass. But the grass grew only to a certain point and then did nto bother to grow into the box-shaped center of the clearing, which was completely barren. The animals realized that something about this clearing was abnormal, which is why they stayed away from it. They dectected a highly abnormal colelction of mana at the box-shaped part of earth, hovering in the air as a comressed shpere of transparent mana, looking like a ball of heated air, shimmering in the light of the bright sun.

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  This collection of mana has been steadingly compressed by nature into a small sphere about the size of a cell when it suddenly gained anough power to tear through the fabric of reality as a sphere. This tear could not be seen by anyone nor felt by anyone - tearing through the fabric of reality, or space-time, meant that light and matter itself would avoid the tear, including mana. The only thing that the animals could tell was that the dense sphere of mana suddenly vanished.

  As soon as the mana sphere vanished, a dull gray rectangular box appeared out of existence, landing directly on the square patch of brown earth, as if it was always there. This steel, rectangular box has obviously seen much better days - the oustide dull and scratched, not longer shiny and smooth. Red sand and dust appeared to have caked the outside and seeped into the inside of the box through the cracks of the front side. Only the top of the box was uncovered with sand, because of the solar panel on the top. This solar panel was coated by Barkley with an especially slick substance, in order to prevent the dust of Mars or any particles of its supposed working space from caking the solar panel, which would cause problems with the recharging rate of the robot's power supply and eventually leave its batteries dry.

  Solar panels work by capturing radiation in the form of light and converting it into electricity through the use of silicon and other conductive metals, which is then conducted by copper wires into whatever battery or electronic device it powers. Additionally, variations of solar panels are also used to capture different forms of heat and radiation as an alternative to past water and salt-based generators, which required the use of fans and generators to convert mechanical energy into electricity, both unwieldy and inefficient. The solar panel, upon reaching this dimension, caught both the light of the Sun and the extreme radiation of the planet, powering up the most basic functions of the frame - the battery indicator of the connected robot, how fast the battery charged up, and determining if it had enough power to release the hatches of the frame, the robot's clamps, and booting up the robot.

[/Power dectected. Batteries at 0.01%. External power source found. Redirecting power to "Robot Battery"]

[/ETA to minimal release requirements: 4 days, 3 hours, 1 minute, and 0 seconds]

[/Entering power saving mode...]

  It ocassionally came out of its power-saving mode to check up on the requirements for releasing the robot once every hour.

  Four days later, it determined that the robot has achieved minimal requirements to boot up.

[/Exiting power saving mode...]

[/Time: ERROR. Time function compromised. Power failure detected.]

[/Sufficient power requirements met for minimal release requirements]

[/Starting release procedure...]

[/Beginning diagnostics...]

[/WARNING: Pressure seal has been compromised. Contamination dectected. Door pneumatics at 10%, clamps at 50% durability. Overall damage dectected.]

[/Diagnostics meet minimal requiremetns for operation.]

[/Starting pressure release...]

HISSS.

  A mechanical hiss oculd be heard as the millions-year old frame opened about an inch per side of the double doors of the frame, spilling clouds of red dust and sand onto the ground. A humanoid body made out of metal was revealed fro mteh fractions of light that penetrated inside, scratched a badly as the frame that covered it. The electromagnetic clamps still held it in place, but they have lost all of their yellow paint.

[/Pressure release finished...]

[/Disengaging clamps...]

Thump. Thump. Thump. Thump.

  Each of the electromagnetic clamps slowly released their magnetic hold in the robot's frame one bo one. Due to the sheer amount of clamps, this took about five minutes to complete, even with the clamps disengaging at a rate of one per ten second, due to their age and damage. Barkley really went overkill on the clamps.

[/Clamps disengaged.]

  All that was left was to disconnect the power cord on the robot's back on the base of the beck, which was connected to the robot's internal power supply. This black, rubber power cable had the diameter of about two inches, and was used to inject high voltages of electricity into the robot to speed up the robot's recharge rate. This cable sent a short pulse of eelctricity to the robot's CPU, and then disengaged, before the doors of the frame opened up to its maximum and revealed the robot's appearance to the world.

[/Booting up robot sytems.]

[/Disengaging power cable...]

[/Power cable disengaged.]

[/Opening frame doors...]

  The door frames slowly creaked open, showing their age and finally releasing the robot to the world beyond. The robot's originally spectacular appearance was marred by the thousands of years that it spend in Mars. It had four arms on its shoulders, two on each side. The arms on the side folded onto each other to create a smingular, stronger arm. It four legs (two on each side like its pelvis) also folded into each other, creating a bidpedal appearance. Its once polished armor was now covered in a thin layer of red dust, except where the clamps attached itself to the surface. The robot twitched, sending dust cascading from its covering and out of its joints.

  Its head released its covers, splitting vertically along the "face" that it had. More dust cascaded out from under the covering. The pistons on the side of the coverings slid the covering onto the back of its head agonizingly slowly. Its eyes on its "face" were nothing more than two sets of glowing LED lihgts on a humanoid face made out of  gray metal similar to its outer covering (or armor), now scratched and filled with red dust, which Barkley put on in order to make it more humalike. The robot initiated its own boot sequence, and its pair of blue LED light "eyes" (set into a circle onto an "eyeball", complete with syncronization) flickered on into existence, with some of them not turning on at all. It looked like something out of a futuristic horror movie that got out a scrapyard, which it did. The scrapyard called Mars, where it laid for thousands of years. 

[/Starting boot sequence...]