After several days of examinations, they still failed to find anything wrong with her.
There were no signs of injury anywhere on her body, and her brainwaves and mental state were completely normal.
They had even carried out a carpet-search of the place where she lived, yet they found no special device of any kind.
And no matter where she went, as long as she focused her mind inward, a window would pop up in her consciousness asking whether she wanted to log into Hyperdimensional Channel.
There was no point continuing to avoid it or pretending it didn't exist.
So today, after returning from the memorial with her father, Lacus decided to log in again.
Log in.
The main channel window popped open, along with a list of who was currently online.
Looking carefully, the channel interface seemed a little different from before.
As for the people online, they all seemed to be gathered in one livestream room, a room called A2's livestream.
What was she broadcasting?
Lacus entered the stream, and the image playing on-screen was...
"The Moon?"
That gray-white sphere of land, covered in massive impact craters, looked exactly like the Moon.
But what caught her attention was that it currently looked as if troops were gathering there.
She could see all kinds of aircraft converging on the location, forming a vast fleet.
She could also see armed aircraft with glowing gun ports patrolling the area.
When the view shifted back to the lunar surface, there was an enormous base there, its fortifications bristling with savage-looking cannon emplacements as it enforced strict security.
It looked like a hedgehog, every spine fully extended.
And beyond the base's own fixed firepower, there were all kinds of tanks, as well as machines that looked almost like mobile suits, all taking part in the lockdown.
Hm?
She even spotted transformable fighter craft that could shift into forms resembling mobile suits.
And beyond that, there were fully armed soldiers standing in perfect formation, arranged into square ranks across an enormous plaza.
It looked like a giant parade ground.
As for this Miss A2 who was doing the livestream, the unit she belonged to seemed even more special.
They looked like some kind of special forces. They had their own dedicated uniforms, their own transport craft, and their own specialized defensive armor.
Their square formation stood at the very front.
So what exactly was going on?
Lacus didn't ask aloud. Instead, she looked at the chat panel attached to the stream, where the comments posted since the livestream began were still visible.
Reading through them, it seemed no one was fully sure what was happening either.
Still, one popular guess seemed to be that this was the beginning of an unprecedented grand offensive against the Machine Lifeforms that occupied most of Earth's surface, an operation to reclaim humanity's homeland.
Which meant that if this world truly existed, a parallel world, then war was also raging there, and humanity was once again...
No.
Lacus's eyes locked onto one particular term again.
Machine Lifeforms.
This was not humanity fighting and slaughtering itself. It looked more like some kind of AI uprising.
Had robots taken over the human world?
And yet some newer comments made her pause.
A war between androids and Machine Lifeforms?
Then what kind of "androids" were these supposed to be?
Artificial lifeforms?
Artificial humans born without natural pregnancy? Something even more radical than Coordinators, perhaps mass-produced in cultivation tanks as bio-engineered humans or clones?
Looking more carefully, Lacus felt these "humans" seemed a little too standardized. They didn't look naturally raised. Instead, they gave off a sense of being mass-produced.
Each and every one of them was so perfectly uniform it was almost to the point that only machines could achieve such consistency.
But these clearly were not robots.
So were they biomechanical humans? Clones?
In other words, had humanity, in order to retake its home while reducing its own losses, mass-produced this kind of lifeform and sent them to war?
Lacus found the idea deeply unsettling, yet she did not immediately jump to condemning the people of that world for such inhuman behavior.
Because she didn't know what had happened in that world.
Humanity there might have suffered something unimaginably catastrophic.
Her gaze then settled on thirteen figures standing at the front. They appeared to be the commanders who led the android forces.
There!
A figure emerged from the base and stepped up onto the platform.
It was a young-looking man.
He should be human.
The moment he took the stage, every last armed unit moved in perfect unison.
The synchronization was so absolute it was startling - like a line of machines operating under a single program. That made Lacus even more certain that these armed forces were all androids, with no humans among them.
"I suppose the story should begin on June 12, 2003."
The moment he began, there was none of the performative greeting or grandstanding of a politician. Instead, he launched directly into what sounded like a story.
"That was the day humanity first began its march toward the apocalypse."
So that was when the Machine Lifeform outbreak had begun?
"On that very day, beings from another dimension came to the human world."
The twist was completely beyond anything Lacus had expected.
So this was not a case of human-made machines rebelling. Beings from another dimension had descended, and the Machine Lifeforms came from another world?
But as he continued, Lacus grew even more stunned.
It was almost fantastical.
Dragons and giants?
Humanity had even mastered magic?
As she kept listening, the crisis of the Machine Lifeforms still had not yet been mentioned, and humanity had already nearly been driven to extinction by a virus.
"In the year 3288, Gestaltified humans began returning to their own Replicants. And thus the war between humanity and the Replicants began."
Hearing that, Lacus's feelings turned complicated.
She now understood that these androids were not the sort of bio-engineered humans or clones she had originally imagined.
The "androids" of this world were robots.
But what she had never expected was that humanity's plan had gone wrong, and the Replicants had developed a sense of self, refusing to let human souls return to the cloned bodies prepared for them.
And so the war began.
The information now being revealed was clearly shaking the androids present at the scene. Most of them obviously had not known any of this.
And seeing such widespread shock among the androids, Lacus realized something else.
These androids also possessed self-awareness.
They were not mere robots.
They too were intelligent life.
"In the year 3465, humanity's restoration project collapsed. Humanity's march toward extinction had become unavoidable. So humanity adopted a new plan."
It turned out that while some humans had succeeded in returning to their Replicant bodies, there were very few of them.
And they soon discovered that even this could not prevent the virus from continuing its erosion. Extinction still seemed inevitable.
So those few surviving humans did what people in old science fiction films did during interstellar voyages too long for a normal lifespan - they entered hibernation devices.
The surviving humans, thanks to the invention of a new technology known as a stasis field, could slow the flow of time around them.
So they lingered on in that state, barely clinging to life, like living plants in a coffin.
"The year is now 5012. Alien life invaded Earth..."
As she listened further, Lacus finally understood where the Machine Lifeforms had come from.
They had been created by alien life.
Humanity had already been barely hanging on, and then it had suffered that on top of everything else.
This world's humanity truly had fallen into even deeper despair.
And then came the next stretch of history.
Seven thousand years?
It was an almost unimaginable span of time.
Until...
"Today, we humans rise from these coffins, and with deep regret, we must tell you something: we are going to have no choice but to abandon you."
It sounded like a suffocating final farewell, the kind of dying words spoken at parting, and it visibly shook the androids.
Hearing it, Lacus's own heart grew unbearably heavy.
(End of Chapter)
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