She hadn’t seen this much plantlife…well, ever. There was grass everywhere. Trees everywhere. Flowers everywhere. SysCom planetary settlements didn’t need that much flora to sustain themselves. The terraforming stations used to make worlds livable in the first place essentially replaced flora on a functional level; they tended to the atmosphere by recycling carbon dioxide and producing oxygen and other elements required by human life. That way, there was more room for housing and vital infrastructure. Vegetable and fruit crops were grown in heavily controlled environments, labs essentially, and harvested by automated systems. Some species were even replaced by synthetic alternatives after they went extinct on Earth. Every city had a park of course, a massive area seeded with plant life that was engineered to be more docile and easier to tend to. Judging by how dense the forests were, how lush the grass was, and how many flowers were scattered in the fields, Madsen realised that nothing here had been treated to be less invasive. So, there she was, sucking up all this pollen that her body wasn't acclimated to. Her nose was bright-red, both nostrils were filled with mucus, her eyes were bloodshot and itchy, and she sneezed every five seconds.

“Agh, fuck…” she muttered as she rubbed her eyes, her blocked nose turning her voice into a stuffy drone. The town that the knight was going on about was getting closer and closer. She was going there because…well, she didn’t really know where else to go. All of the platforms she ran into so far had no idea what the fuck she was, had never seen a human before, and rambled on about vampires, wizards, and dragons.

“Doth thou wish to rest, thy eminence?” asked the knight politely.

Madsen sniffed, sucking all the mucus back up her nose, as she ignored the question. She didn’t know what else to think about this place aside from it being some messed up attraction where people could watch human-like robots murder each other. The way the knight shanked all of those dudes in the tunnels…it looked like that was what it was made for. It also made Madsen realise something a little freaky. If all of these robots are designed to be just as fragile as people and the knight guy easily fucked up like seven of them at once…then he could just as easily kill me.

Suddenly, she turned her head to look at the knight. Now that they were in daylight, she could see his armour a bit more clearly. It was essentially toasted black all over, like someone doused it in oil and lit it up for a few seconds before putting it out. “Hey. Can you…kill me?”

The knight froze in his tracks. Madsen kept walking for a bit but ultimately stopped with a very loud and annoyed groan. “Ugh, what? What is it?” She sneezed pretty much straight after.

“Is that…a-a request?” stammered the robot.

It took a couple seconds for Madsen to realise that she probably didn’t phrase it that well. “No, no, I meant, like, could you? Would you?”

“I…I would never allow any harm to befall thee, least of all perform such a thing myself.”

Leaning back onto the handlebar of the Phil cart to accelerate it, Madsen moaned, “Okay, okay, thanks. Come on.”

When they reached the outskirts of the village, Madsen couldn't help but stare at the architecture. She was used to every piece of construction material being mathematically perfect thanks to modern fabrication methods. On this one house she saw, a few planks of wood that served as the structural frame varied in thickness and some even curved slightly. The walls themselves were made of this white stuff; she had no idea what it was. Her engineer's eye quickly noticed that some of these white walls weren't perfectly square…the entire second storey floor was slightly wonky even. So, someone designed these buildings to look like they were built by hand. Either that or they were actually built by hand. Pft, right. When’s the last time anyone built anything by hand?

Madsen’s focus was snatched by a robot standing on the side of the dirt road. It wore a very bright green dress and a white cap thing on its head. Its face was contorted and its mouth was about to spring open. The human shut her eyes for a second and groaned, “Oh god, here we go...”

A very, very, very loud scream tore through the air. There were heaps of other platforms in the street moving stuff into the houses that consequently froze in place. A couple of them came running over.

“By God’s grace…what is that thing?!”

“Stay back creature!” roared an android as it seized a long wooden pole and held it at the ready. More and more of them gathered around…and all of a sudden, Madsen started to feel nervous. She wasn’t exactly well-versed in old Earth history, but she knew enough to recognise that at least a handful of them were soldiers. They wore armour, not the same full-body kind that her knight friend did, but they had some nonetheless. The soldiers drew their swords. Madsen narrowed her eyes as she made a step backwards.

"Calm thyself, my children!” shouted the knight. Instantly, the villagers froze. As the knight stepped in front of Madsen, he continued, “I understand thy terror, I do. But heed my words, as my Order serves as God’s judgement upon this earth. There is nothing to fear. This is Madsen. She…is an angel."

Madsen fought against the muscles in her face that were wrenching her lips into a very poorly-timed smile. A suppressed laugh that lasted half a second forced its way up her throat and through her clenched teeth. I can’t. I can’t even.

The platforms stopped creeping closer, but they were still poised. The knight, again, tried to calm them down. “I found her in a deep slumber within a Pale Spire that bore the sign of the Pillar itself!” The villagers gasped. “When she awoke, she mended wounds that should have placed me within the embrace of death. She performed a miracle in saving the life of this humble servant who would have eagerly died for the glory of Heaven.”

All eyes drifted from Alric back onto Madsen. She heard whispers flowing through the crowd. A man came forward. He wore a stark white dress thing, a lot like the one the knight wore just without the little picture on the front. On top of this he had a brown cloak. “Brother Thestor…if what you say is true, then this so-called angel changes everything. However, surely you understand that we cannot simply take you at your word. The Devil is a master of manipulation. Even those of undying faith can be seduced by his machinations.”

“Father, surely thou do not presume to accuse me of–”

“I do not accuse you of anything, Brother. We simply wish to witness these miracles for ourselves so that we may be convinced as you were,” replied the other guy. Eventually she realised that it was supposed to be a priest or something like that.

The knight turned to face Madsen and softly, it asked, “Art thou willing to perform another miracle? The people desire proof of thy divine power.”

If she was going to be honest with herself, she thought all of it was all a gigantic waste of time. None of those things were alive, they weren’t controlled by other people, and they weren’t instructed to do anything apart from be extras in a fantasy movie. Madsen talking to them was no different to her sitting around playing with toys. She wasn’t exactly keen on this messed up worship thing either. It made her feel weird. But she had no idea what else to do. There was no sign of actual civilization other than the androids themselves…so she didn’t have a choice but to hang around them in hopes of finding whoever owned them.

Well. I guess I’m Jesus, she thought to herself with a shrug.

With a long, loud sucking of snot back up her nose and a massaging of her very red nose, Madsen reluctantly said, “Yeah…sure.”

The knight’s face went blank for a moment. “Phaemslake…” it muttered. Suddenly, he roared back to life like someone poured 10 litres of coffee into his mouth. “The Hospital. We must go to the Hospital.”

“You guys have hospitals? Mmkay…”

Madsen got a good look at all the villagers as they stood in front of their slightly wonky houses and stared at her as she followed Alric down the maid road. The villagers’ clothing were a range of vibrant blues, yellows, browns, and occasional reds and purples. Madsen thought that maybe her heavily saturated blue flight suit and flaming red basketball shoes were gonna make her stand out, but she actually kind of fit in. The vast spectrum of colours kept her attention for most of the walk. But when the shadow of a massive structure shielded her from the sun, her head craned upwards and her mouth dropped open.

“Woah. Holy moley.”

It was like the world was pissed that she was being so antsy about those houses not being perfect so it dropped a crazy goddamn mountain of a building in front of her. Solid stone bricks comprised the walls that traced around a central structure. The walls and the inner building both had elements of Gothic architecture in their design; crazy flourishes, channels, spires, and reliefs covered every inch of their surfaces. It was so big.

“Holy indeed,” added the knight.

Madsen’s eyelids fluttered. “Is this…is this a castle?”

“I am afraid not. Castles are much larger, although I must admit that they certainly lack in beauty when compared to Church architecture. This, thy eminence, is a Hospital of Saint Corren. One of the many tributes we give to Heaven. I know not the methods of heavenly beings such as thyself, but we mortals build using our hands. Each stone was placed here by a group of hardworking men.”

Madsen wrinkled her brow. “Wait. You guys built this by hand? All of this?” she asked, pointing at the Hospital as well as the town. “It wasn’t just…already here for you? How long did it take? How did you move all of the stone? How did you carve it?”

The platform smacked its lips, like it was overloaded by the many questions.

It was likely that all of the stuff was already supplied by humans and the platforms were told to respond as if they’d been standing for centuries. To maintain whatever crazy illusion it was that the manufacturers wanted to provide.

Madsen quickly forgot about the questions she asked when a freakish sight confronted her in the Hospital’s courtyard. She came to a halt, a small crowd of villagers watching her from outside the walls of the Hospital.

“By His grace…” whispered the knight, its voice cracking. It jogged forward, arms outstretched. It came into contact with a four-legged thing that neighed and eagerly tapped its front hooves on the dirt upon seeing the knight, who embraced the thing and rubbed its neck. “My beautiful girl…!”

It had two glowing optical sensors, a mane of synthetic fibres, layers of self-healing polymer ‘skin’, and synth-meat flesh. It was built just like all the other platforms…except it was replicating the physiology of a horse instead. Madsen had maybe seen one or two horses in her lifetime at zoos. Heaps in movies of course, but that didn’t really count. So she couldn’t personally speak for the authenticity, but it…felt real.

The thing made a bunch of weird noises as it trembled in excitement and licked the knight’s face. Madsen had seen the knight make a few complex expressions in the six or so hours that she knew it for but for the first time, she just saw it smile. Then grin. Then laugh. The servos in its face that drove these expressions made miniscule twitches and micro-adjustments while the knight fiercely patted the robotic animal. Madsen couldn’t help but be unnerved at how…believable the actions were.

All of a sudden, the knight jerked his head around and announced loudly to her, “This is a horse.”

Madsen sighed, hunched, and smacked her lips. “Wow. Never coulda guessed,” she said monotonously.

She left the Phil and came closer to the knight and the horse. Oddly, the steed didn’t seem to be bothered by Madsen’s presence. It looked at her as if she was no different to the knight.

“Do not be afraid,” assured the knight.

Fuck off. Pardon me for being weirded about by the friggin’ robot horse.

The engineer, without any signs of fear, approached the robotic horse and pressed a hand against its snout. Like the androids, the horse produced its own body heat. It had a fibrous texture to its skin though, as opposed to the completely smooth membrane that the androids had.

“Shall we proceed, thy eminence?” the knight pressed. Madsen had to pry herself away from the robotic horse. It was spooky…and she had a habit of liking spooky. She snapped open a crate on the Phil and pulled out her DIAG-R before slamming it shut again.

The inside of the Hospital place smelled. It smelled like honey and flowers. Madsen sneezed again. This time, it bounced off the stone walls and the echo warped it into a gigantic roar. There were about thirty full beds lined up in the building’s central hall. Every patient, all of the ones that were awake, had their eyes pinned on Madsen. So did the people staffing the facility.

Without wasting another second, the knight stepped deeper inside and raised his hands. “Brothers and sisters, fellow children of the Lord, fear not the strange being in thy midst. She is here to offer salvation.”

Madsen sniffled and wiped her nose with a scowl. “You’re a strange being…” she grumbled.

“Madsen is one of God’s own trusted partners. An angel. She is here to end thy suffering.”

The human’s head cocked to one side as she walked along the chamber. There were platforms that didn’t even react to Madsen’s presence; they just kept moaning and wincing like they were simulating pained reactions. She wasn’t paying them any mind, but everyone who was conscious stared wide-eyed at her as she strode across the Hospital.

One of the ‘injured’ in particular stood out to her. It sat on a bed with its back against the wall and its eyes staring wistfully out the window to its left. Both of its legs were cut short at the thigh.

The knight joined Madsen after a minute or so. “Lamar…?”

The damaged one slowly turned away from the window. After taking a second to give the knight’s face a deep stare, it huffed in amusement. “You look like you were swallowed by a leviathan and expelled out its rear end.”

“I could say the same to thee,” replied the knight.

The damaged one laughed with a shake of its head. Only then did it notice Madsen. Its eyes widened and its mouth trembled. “I-I thought it was just another sermon for us damned. Is it true? You are an angel?”

Madsen lifted her DIAG-R and swiped away on its screen for quite a while. Since there were like a million other units in the Hospital, she had to manually open each diagnostics tag and check what kind of damage they had. Eventually, she found the right one. With her time performing maintenance on the knight, she was able to relabel the subsystems that she had figured out and import the designations. After doing that, the E-Gel pathways, artificial lungs, SSD, and musculature layers were labelled in good old English. Everything else was still a random string of characters though. She was going to have to figure it all out as she went.

Due to the components being missing entirely, Madsen didn’t take too long to find the items in the systems list that most likely made up the lower legs. Big red letters reading ‘ERROR, SYSTEM DISCONNECTED’ floated next to a handful of subsystems.

“I need room to work,” Madsen said to no one in particular.

In the following handful of minutes, the guys working at the Hospital moved the damaged android into the next room as Madsen went back to the Phil and dug through a crate labelled ‘maintenance equipment’. She found spools of nanowire, an A21 plasma cutter, ME-B5 precision plasma welder, soldering iron, NNt impact driver, and additional Flow payload capsules. Basically, it was everything she needed. Except for the replacement parts.

She scratched the back of her head as her eyes drifted from her Phil and fell onto a wooden cart in the corner of the Hospital courtyard. It had a sheet of fabric laid over the top, covering its contents. The engineer narrowed her eyes as she approached. Seizing the sheet, Madsen threw it off the wagon.

“Well. Isn’t that convenient.”

The thing was stacked with at least a dozen non-functional platforms. All ‘humans’. Like a parent at a grocery store, Madsen closely inspected the legs of each one. She eventually settled on a pair that had minor cosmetic scuffs but seemed to articulate perfectly fine at the knees. Taking the plasma cutter in hand, Madsen stuck her tongue out of the corner of her mouth, secured one of the platform’s legs, and pressed the tool against it.

“Madsen?”

After taking a very deep sigh, Madsen lowered the cutter and peered over her shoulder. The knight was standing there looking very confused. “What art thou doing?”

“I’m getting new legs for your friend.”

The knight swallowed then gestured out the front of the courtyard. Basically everyone from the village was gathered out the front of the Hospital, staring at Madsen with horrified looks on their faces. “Perhaps…that work is best conducted indoors. If I had not witnessed thy nature first hand…I may think that necromancy was thy trade.”

Madsen shook her head with a grumble. “Ugh.”

The knight waved another android over, this one wearing dirty clothes, and the two of them heaved the disabled one up and into the Hospital. Madsen clutched the maintenance equipment crate, gritted her teeth, and lifted with her legs. The 50 kilogram box was a bit awkward, but she managed to take it inside on her own.

“Jesus…” she sighed as she dropped the crate next to the operating table with an echoing ‘bang’. Her patient was lying down on the table looking nervous as the knight and his pal lowered the non-functional platform onto a desk.

Madsen wiped a few drops of sweat from her forehead as she sent her eyes around the dimly lit room. It was super dark; there were no windows, so the only light came from what Madsen thought were faint candles. However, after a closer look, she realised that they were small burning stalks of plant matter that were held upright by metal holders. They barely did anything; only a radius of a couple feet around them were painted with flickering yellow light.

The room itself was pretty neatly kept from the little that Madsen could actually see. On the far side of the room, there were a series of shelves with random vials of junk lined up across them. A leather tool bag was rolled open on a rickety desk, revealing dozens of implements ranging from razors to pliers.

After a few minutes of uselessly squinting through the darkness, Madsen gave up and pulled a compact worklight out of her equipment crate. She extended its telescopic stand and planted it on the ground. It then stood a little over Madsen’s height. After she thumbed the power button, cool white light instantly flooded the room.

A panicked gasp bounced off the walls of the cold, stone room.

“It is alright, my friend,” whispered the knight to the one lying on the operating table.

Now being able to actually see with good old LED lighting, Madsen laid out her tools onto the desk that held the nonfunctional platform that she was going to strip for parts. As she did, the knight ushered everyone else back out of the room and shut the door.

Madsen started powering up all of her tools and checking the battery levels. Then there came a very hushed murmur from the damaged android. “Y-You’re not going to let her butcher me and that other sod, are you?”

The knight urgently returned to its side. Madsen’s hands moved without her even needing to look at them; she’d done these checks a million times before, so she was able to keep her eyes fixed on what the two platforms were doing.

“She shall do no such thing. Madsen shall restore what thou hath lost.”

The damaged one’s eyes relaxed and his anxious fiddling stopped.

“Magic is not what we thought it to be. It is not the stuff of Hell, but instead tools of the angels.” The knight grasped the android’s hand and said, “Have faith…and trust me, my friend. All is well.”

Robots talking to each other…far out. They could communicate a million times more efficiently by just doing it wirelessly and directly transmitting data. This is the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen.

Madsen prepped her DIAG-R and opened the platform’s SSD settings. The knight watched her for a moment, then turned back to his friend. “You will sleep now, Lamar. We shall see each other in but a moment.”

As she stood over it, her finger hovering above the ‘FORCE HIBERNATE’ command on the DIAG-R, its eyes met hers. They blinked rapidly. Its chest expanded and contracted in concert with its frantic breaths.

She then pressed the hibernate option and released a heavy exhale. The damaged platform’s body froze and its eyes went dark.

Hesitantly, the knight let himself out and shut the door behind him. With all of the creepy robot people out of her way, Madsen got to work. Seeing as she had basically no real understanding of the mechanical and electrical systems inside these machines, she was not expecting it to go well. But it was going to be a good learning opportunity. You know, for science.

She started by unwrapping the bandages that hugged what was left of the legs. Cross-sectioned nanowires, E-Gel pathways, and structural frame material jutted out from beneath the synth tissue. Madsen measured out the leg on the donor, closely correlating with the damage on the subject to make sure she was making a cut at the right interval. After the lines were drawn out with a marker, it was time to start.

Madsen had to disable a few safeties on the A21 before she could use it to harvest the appendages; it was designed to cut metal, not stuff that was designed to be similar to soft tissue and bone. The cutter itself was like a handheld buzzsaw, except the cutting edge was completely straight, static, and relied on superheated energy to slice through material. Against synth tissue and the inner-frame of the donor android, it was like a hot knife through butter. It did cause some of the excess E-Gel to sizzle and pop though, reminding Madsen that the stuff was volatile when superheated. She could get away with it on the non-functional platform because it was essentially dried up…but the other one that was full of fresh E-Gel would probably violently explode as soon as she made contact with the gel.

You’re a dumbass. Just a friendly reminder in case you didn’t know what to do: don’t blow yourself up.

All the heat from the cutter was making her sweat like a fountain, not at all helped by the thermal layers in her flight suit or the stone walls of the room. She zipped the jumpsuit down to her waist, slipped out of the sleeves, then tied them around her waist. After plucking at her tank top to peel it from her sweaty-ass skin, Madsen dove back in. After twenty minutes or so, she had two dismembered robot legs lined up on her workspace.

Then it was time for the real meticulous stuff. Six hours of work followed. She had to wire the new limbs into the platform’s existing subsystems network. That meant a whole lot of keeping her hands steady while she soldered and linked nanowire. Even though nothing was labelled on the diagnostics, all of the cables were grouped in the same way on both units, making it easier than Madsen expected to reconnect everything. The result was messy and not exactly entirely well-organised, but it would mend the connections and restore functionality at the very least. Eventually, the systems that were labelled as missing on the DIAG-R started turning green. She still had no idea what most of them were, but it was better than nothing.

“Ayyyy.”

The next part involved mending the internal frame of the platform. Basically sticking the skeletons together somehow. Welding was her first plan since the material did have some metallic properties, but having a heat source that close to charged E-Gel didn’t seem to be a good idea. Injecting Nanos and instructing them to bind the matter together could work, but the seal would be super duper flimsy on material like that. If she wanted the skeleton to snap after a few days, sure, Nanos would totally do. After a very comprehensive ten minutes of thinking, Madsen begrudgingly started cleaning up as much E-Gel as she could to prep the area for welding.

Fluctuating blossoms of yellow washed over the stark white of the worklight as Madsen seared the frames together with her welding torch. The polarised visor of her welding mask protected her eyes from the blinding flashes. Sizzles, pops, and bangs echoed off the walls of the room, filling her nerves with dread. She started humming to herself in an effort to not think about possible spontaneous combustion.

Just to be sure, she fixed a handful of small brackets to the frames with bolts using her impact driver to make sure that it wasn’t going to snap. And just like that, after a grand total of only eight hours, Madsen found herself experiencing a harsh occasion of deja vu; she was using Nanos and self-healing polymer tape to mend the synth-meat tissue of a humanoid robot.

She tapped the DIAG-R a few times as it sat on the surface of the desk laden with tools, flipping the welding mask open and wiping the litres of sweat from her forehead. Madsen reactivated the android’s SSD.

Slowly, the android’s eyes warmed from a dull black to a cold blue. It blinked a couple times as it stared at the ceiling. Madsen bit her lower lip as she kept her eyes pinned on its newly attached legs. A toe twitched. Then another. Then the whole ankle. The platform itself detected that something was weird, so it sat up and glanced down.

Its expression softened and its eyes widened. The artificial musculature in its jaw tightened as a wavering breath was expelled from its lips. It ran a finger down its legs, causing the muscles to flex in response. The android’s eyes swiped up to meet Madsen’s. It chuckled. After a moment, it erupted in thunderous laughter. Tears streamed down its face.

“Oh mon Dieu, bless you! Bless your soul!” it sobbed, crying and laughing all at once as it flexed its new legs back and forth.

Madsen was frozen in place as the platform sprung off the table and landed on its feet with a slight wobble. It paced over to her and seized her by the shoulders. “You have saved me, angel from above! I owe you my very life!”

As it spoke, its hands trembled and its fingers dug into her skin. It continued ranting on and on about how miraculous it all was, leaving Madsen to internally freak out and stare into its eyes which were still spewing tears. There was nothing that made any rational sense about how these robots were designed. They were made of advanced synthetic materials, but they broke and failed just like the frail humans that built them. They had wireless connectivity, but they didn’t communicate with each other using it. They could cry to emulate emotion, but they couldn’t sneeze to emulate sickness. Who made these weird arbitrary decisions? What kind of a maniac had such an inconsistent plan?