Some sparkles were seen in his iron bones. The metal hand fumbled in his head and took out a blue crystal as big as an egg. Then he stumbled to a female body on the ground and put the crystal into her brain, which was still open. The robot fell since there was no energy left in his body. A few minutes later, that woman stood up. The videos after that became more interesting. There were no metal robot men or blood hawks. The video was filmed in a very high position, overlooking all the architecture of the Palace, many crowded streets, and citizens passing by. The videos of the Palace began to repeat discontinuously. A white cloth was hung all over the Palace, and the men and women wearing court clothes were crying and walking; then the white cloth was gone, and lots of robot men were kneeling on the street outside the Palace, shouting something altogether. Then, the Palace was decorated with scarlet banners and adornments, and the streets outside the Palace were decorated with lanterns and colorful hangings. These scenes kept repeating several times. “What’s going on?” Then, someone asked, “How could blood hawks’ film this if they were the ground?” Harrison shook his head and hands. “I don’t know either. Was it filming it from the sky? Maybe the repetition was caused by a mechanical breakdown.” “It was not a breakdown,” Patrick said. Everyone turned to look at him as he said with a cold face. “The video was stable, which means it was not filmed from the sky. Those blood hawks must have been put at a conspicuous place from the beginning. The first scene was the death of their emperor, the second one showed that the princess inherited the throne, and the third one was the grand marriage of the princess. The number at the right bottom of the screen should be the filming time. According to the interval of the time, these things repeated every year.” “Repeat?” Even Harrison didn’t understand. Patrick’s face was as cold as ice. “That’s how the program was designed. The blood hawk was parked somewhere, but no one could see it, maybe because of the program, and the citizens there thought that they were humans in an ancient civilization. Then somehow, the blood hawk went underground. On the first day of every year, the program will be restarted, and the big events will happen as programmed, resetting every end of the year. When a new year comes, the process will repeat until we come and disrupt their program and process.” Again, everyone was stunned. Harrison opened his mouth and lowered his head quickly to look at the image of each interval, then raised his head and looked at the other. “It’s true.”Everyone looked back at the screen, looking at the date, which was on different years with the same scenes repeating again and again. The expressions were a mix of sadness, excitement, and happiness, as real as if it was the first time they experienced it. This discovery was surprising and terrifying at the same time. The mercenary officers couldn’t understand why the silver robot man had spent his whole life transforming a planet just for a repeated game. In the unlimited time of space, these robot men repeated their lives according to the program, again and again, living lonely on a remote planet without anyone knowing about their existence. It was like a dream where you never wake up. Why was the most sophisticated machine civilization willing to create and operate in an underdeveloped and desolate world? Patrick stood up to conclude. “This is just a mechanical world built by a robotic maniac.” A stern and experienced captain then asked. “What should we do with all these robotic men? There are thousands.”Everyone looked at Patrick again. Although the mercenaries had always been bullies, they had never captured so many people in space combat before, let alone robots. Patrick remained silent; meanwhile, an older said. “Commander, we have to obey the rules of the older generation of the mercenary.” His words reminded Patrick of eight years ago when he followed his boss, Malcolm Gerald, at that time, to do a task where they had met a team of exiled robot men. It had been almost 5000 light-years away in a nebula that was seriously polluted by nuclear radiation. They had met an old silver fighter, the same as the princesses’ fighter they had seen last night. Before any communication, the fighter had opened fire. The mercenary destroyed the silver fighter at the cost of three Cheetahs. The pilots of the silver fighter had fallen out, three silver-white robotic men who had died immediately from the blast wave of the explosion that had cut through their bodies.They had examined the debris of the robot fighters and had found that they were several thousand years old. This incident had stayed a secret between Patrick and Malcolm. Malcolm had told Patrick that they must erase every trace those robots had left because rumor had it that the old generation of mercenaries should kill every robot man they meet. The machine civilization had died out several thousand years ago, and those robots were survivors of the machine civilization, living in exile at the edge of space. After that incident, Patrick had never met another robot until now when he met the princess, who had the same smell as those robotic men. The smell was so faint that no other mercenary had noticed it, but Patrick had. He had thought the princess was controlled by someone else, so he let her go back to the ground not to alarm the robot man he thought was controlling her. He hadn’t expected that the robot princess had controlled and sealed her consciousness and treated herself as a human being to perfect her dream. Her consciousness had finally woken when her world had become threatened, and she had sensed that her end was near. On the thought of that, Patrick lowered his tone, “Harrison Gates!” Harrison answered in a serious tone. “Yes, sir.” “I want to evacuate all the resources on this planet in one month,” Patrick said with a determined voice. “Destroy the planet with nuclear bombs after you’re finished. No debris or trace of the robot population on the planet should be left in space as if they never existed.”