Android Alien Apocalypse Harem - Arc 1 Box Set

by Natalie Hunter

  The second swig wasn't as bad, now he knew what to expect, and by the third he was actually becoming somewhat keen on the flavor. But from what little he knew about the practice of drinking, he thought it best not to have any more yet. It wasn't making him feel any different, but he knew it took a bit of time to enter the bloodstream, and also that inexperienced drinkers couldn't tolerate much of it. And there were none more inexperienced than he.

  He screwed the lid back on, turning, ready to go up and show Maddy his discovery, when he became suddenly aware of someone beside him. Someone had rushed quickly and quietly around the corner of the Lucky Buy, and was now right there, close enough to touch him.

  Damn androids.

  "I guess you've come to have me claim you as your master, right? Well, it's actually your even luckier day, because now you have a choice of two humans you can serve! Be claimed by me, the guy who's trying to get drunk, or be claimed by the hot ass female one, who knows way too much about the bible but is a lot more fun than she sounds," he announced, with a slight chuckle. Perhaps the rum was starting to work, because he was pretty sure he was being very witty.

  "I... I do want to be claimed by a human man. But... I'm not an android," said a shy female voice.

  Curtis looked at the figure properly for the first time. They were covered in what had looked like a big hooded cloak at first, but he could see now was a ratty old gray blanket. He couldn't see her face.

  He frowned in confusion.

  "You'll have to be a bit less vague, I'm afraid I've been drinking!" he said, sniggering.

  But his laughter stopped as a delicate hand and wrist appeared out from under the blanket-cloak and wrapped its finger around his wrist.

  The hand was blue.

  TO BE CONTINUED

  RE:DEFINE

  Android Alien Apocalypse Harem: Book Three

  (The Final Part of The Sanctuary Arc)

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  © Natalie Hunter 2019

  Chapter 1

  "Who are you? You're not one of the androids, but... your skin..."

  Curtis was naturally assuming by the fact that the woman hidden under the blanket (who'd just appeared from seemingly nowhere as he'd been moving to go back into the Lucky Buy and introduce Madeleine to very, very aged liquor), had a blue hand, that she was something to do with the aliens. The aliens who'd invaded Earth and forced his ancestors to move into Sanctuary to avoid the destruction that had been wreaked on just about everybody else - except the robots.

  The androids had told him that some of the 'blue monsters', as they called them, were still around. Just not here. They'd supposedly settled in some regions on Earth, leaving behind areas like this one that were low on some resource or other that their species wanted,, and high on android resistance. He hadn't wanted to ask just how these beings were so dangerous to humans, but were unable to defeat man-made androids, because it had seemed like the answer would probably make him paranoid. It most likely involved the aliens doing something wholly unpleasant to parts that the humans had and the androids didn't, like the brain or the central nervous system. But now, in a mild rum-induced haze and possibly meeting an alien for the first time, he wished he had found out more about them. He really hadn't thought he'd have to worry about them at all unless he eventually wanted to leave the region, and that wasn't on the cards in his near future - he'd only been out in this world for a couple of weeks, and he already had plenty to do in the closest city. But none of his prior assumptions altered his current reality: normal people didn't have blue hands, and neither did any android he had seen.

  "Who I am is... not easy to explain... but I don't mean you any harm. I have been following you - I sensed a human, stronger than normal, back at the mountain, and the first time I was too scared to approach you when I saw you, but then you left and I wasn't sure what to do. But, after wandering a lot, I caught the feel of you again, and then I found this place. But you left again. This time though, you came back, and with another human, too. I knew I had to be brave and approach you but... but away from the androids. I'm sorry if I scared you."

  Her voice was light and ethereal, and sad. He squinted, as if trying to look through the mangy blanket she had covering herself like a hooded cloak.

  "Well, if you won't tell me who you are, can you at least show me what you look like? I have heard... less than positive things about people with blue skin, so as you might imagine I'm a bit --"

  She let go of his wrist and pulled the blanket back off of her face and hair. Yeah, she was blue alright. A kind of sky blue color, with royal blue hair, that was matted and looked in bad need of a wash. Her face was humanoid though, it was as if it was only the colors that were wrong. She actually looked like she'd be a very beautiful young woman if she was cleaned up a bit, and if it wasn't for the bright yellow eyes and... all the blue, she might just be a normal human girl like Sophie.

  This was not what he'd been expecting an alien to look like. She wasn't very monstrous at all.

  "So, you're... an alien?"

  She shook her head fiercely, her tangled hair swinging around her face.

  "No. I was created by them, but I'm not one of them. I have never left this planet, and I am just as much if not more human than I am one of those people."

  "I'm sorry, I've never seen an alien, I don't honestly know what they're like, just that they aren't exactly safe to have around. I'm sorry if what I said was in some way offensive, but, you know, they tell me the aliens are blue and you're," he gestured broadly up and down at her.

  "The aliens, as you call them, they call themselves the Aerquan. And well, they do a lot of experiments. I am the product of one of them. There are whole compounds of people like me in their cities, people with bits of their essence and bits of human essence or even animal essence all tangled together. But once they've made us and had a good look at us, they don't really know what else to do with us, you see."

  She looked strangely calm as she described all of this, and Curtis couldn't help but follow her story along as if it was a much more normal tale than it was, nodding in the right places, but not properly taking in the strangeness of it all, instead trying to rationalize it.

  Essense... maybe she means DNA or something. Is she saying the aliens are trying to create some new species by combining their DNA with that of humans and other creatures from Earth? I suppose that wouldn't be such a strange thing for them to experiment with, maybe to try to find cures for their diseases or something...

  "We aren't accepted as proper people so we can't be part of their society, but they don't want to just kill us because they want to know things like how long we live and what illnesses affect us and stuff. So, they keep us in compounds like my old home. It's kind of like a big camp, where all of us experiments live and they just sort of oversee us, and occasionally they take one of us to do more experiments... But, see, I have a lot of human in me, and all I ever wanted to do was just... be among my people. I read old human books we found lying around, all the stories of the humans, and I just knew that they were out there somewhere and they'd accept me, because look, I'm just like a human, aren't I? No tentacles, no tail, two legs. I'm really, really human. And if I mate with a human man - the old way, like in the books, not the way I was made - then my children will be even more human still. And so I escaped, and I moved around the country a lot for a long time, hiding from the androids, surviving however I could, until I found a place where I could sense lots of humans. But I could never tell where they were. Their signatures were everywhere, but I could never see them. It wasn't until the day I saw you that I understood - you were all inside the mountain."

  "Wait, so you knew there were humans in the area? How does that work? You know real humans can't sense human life, right?"

  The girl looked crestfallen, suddenly, and Curtis realized what he'd just said.

  "That's, uh, not to say y
ou're not a real human because you can do that... It's more like, well, you're better than a human. Superhuman! There, that's not so bad, is it?"

  She didn't look convinced, but she carried on.

  "I don't know how or why I can do it, and I wasn't sure if humans could do it too because to be honest I have never spoken to one until now. There was another compound where the humans were kept in the city I lived in, but there was much more security on that than on the one with us experiments. Humans were rare and they wanted to make sure nothing happened to the ones they had carefully bred for their essence. But I knew exactly where they were and how many. Then, once I escaped the city, I didn't sense any humans at all for a really long time while I traveled. Your mountain, I could feel the humanity there, but not enough to tell apart individual humans or know properly where they were. But being near to the mountain made me feel calm, almost like I was with my people at last, even if they didn't know..."

  Now the strangeness was hitting him.

  "But, being able to sense other beings, is that a thing the Aerquan can do? You have some of their... essence, too, right? Maybe you have some of their skills but in a human form?"

  He chose his words carefully so as not to offend her - it was already apparent how important it was to this girl to be regarded as human. But he wanted to know what kinds of powers the aliens had, because it seemed important now - if she'd found him, maybe other aliens would want to too.

  If they really bred their own special human specimens to experiment on then, well, that sounded like something that would make them interested in him, and also something that would mean there was no reality in which he could ever envisage trying to live in peace with their kind. He'd been imagining a simple situation out here where the androids were doing their thing, waiting for any humans who were still hiding around the world to resurface, and the aliens had just claimed their own parts of the world. If the humans made any kind of comeback, they'd be small in number, and they could have just occupied the areas held by the robots, keeping them as protection. The aliens could have stayed wherever whatever it was they liked to mine or harvest was, and there wouldn't need to be any conflict. Now though, he realized how naive that was. They weren't just here mining or farming. They were trying to get more out of the Earth's resources by combining them with their own, those resources including our very evolution. And they were obviously using some fairly fucked up approaches. Suddenly his new world was a lot more complex, a lot less like a fun playground full of sexy women and cool machines that would do whatever he asked them. His head ached, as if he was already starting to get a hangover, even though he'd only just finished drinking his three mouthfuls of rum.

  "Yes. They can do all kinds of telepathic stuff involving human minds, and I suppose that being able to just lock on to a human is the most simple, basic form of that. But that's all I can do. I couldn't kill a human that way. You have to tell the androids that, by the way. I had to stay away from the androids. They kill the Aerquan on sight so that they can't use their psychic attacks on any living creatures nearby - physically they are quite weak and they don't much consider non-psychic combat, so the androids kill them easily - and of course, that means I don't have time to explain to androids that I'm human... And here, there was you, but there were also more androids than I've ever seen in my life... That's why I've been hiding and waiting for you or the other human to come out the back of the building here."

  Curtis rubbed his temples and slid down the wall until he was sitting on the dusty ground. He needed to think. The aliens had psychic attacks, then. Fatal ones, presumably. That would explain why the humans had been defeated so comprehensively by them on invasion day, and the androids had been able to fight. Perhaps the signs of some damage a long time ago, like the wrecked parking lot outside of the Lucky Buy, were made by some humans trying to use normal weapons defensively, or by the robots fighting the Aerquan, and not by the attacking space invaders. Or perhaps they were just from some unrelated earthquake. It was hard to know what he should be focusing on.

  He was also aware that he'd dashed out of the room where he'd just been having fun with Madeleine and Pinky without really saying where he was going, and that someone might decide to look for him at any moment (probably Maddy, since the robots under his command all knew better than to nose into his movements and actions too much).

  "I... I think I understand why you found me, and what your situation is, and I can make it safe for you with the androids here, as long as they're ones me and Maddy control, and we're planning to control 'em all in this region. I can give a batch order to be communicated across their whole network that you are not to be harmed. But... other than that, I don't really understand what it is you want from me? If you want to be somewhere safe where people will look after you, well, you can stick in the region we control and that'll be that, but I don't know, I get the impression that really, you want, or, I don't know, need maybe, something more than just somewhere to live?"

  But she'd descended on him where he was slumped on the ground in exhausted, mind-aching thought, and she was hugging him around the neck, more of her blue arms emerging out from under her blanket-robe. Curtis noticed with mild amusement that she didn't smell anywhere near as bad as she looked like she would up close, and wondered if that was an alien power, too.

  "OK, OK, calm down. Look, first I'll go and make sure all the androids in here know not to hurt you, and then you should come inside and get cleaned up. I'll have Pinky run you a bath and we can find some clothes for you. But, so I can tell the androids who they're not to harm, and just because, well, it's normal, can you tell me your name?"

  "I... experiments don't have names. I have a number, but..."

  "Oh, man, that's messed up, even Pinky has a nickname! What did your friends at the compound you lived in call you?"

  "We just called each other by number... I'm Zero-Seventeen."

  "I... that feels wrong. Can I give you a name? Just a nickname, you know, nothing formal, just something we can call you around here that is a bit more... human than Zero-Seventeen?"

  She hugged him even tighter now, and he could feel her arms trembling. He guessed having a human name must have been something she'd always wanted, but hadn't felt proper giving to herself.

  "Well, let's see. I'm not good at coming up with this stuff, but I think we should call you Sky. I know it's a bit unoriginal, since I'm just going by the color of your skin, but Pinky is named after the color of her hair and... Well, the sky is something that's actually quite important to me. I'd never seen the sky when I was inside the mountain, and when I came out here and I saw it for the first time, that was when I was free. Maybe, I don't know, it will bring you luck and freedom too or something... Don't listen to me, I'm drunk."

  But he could tell by her happy little sobs that Sky was thrilled by her new name.

  Chapter 2

  "So, she was made out of alien and human DNA and then just... left in a compound?" Madeleine asked, her kind eyes showing her disbelief at the story she'd just been told.

  Curtis had told Pinky to tell everybody else not to harm Sky, that she was to be treated with the same respect as a human (though, he did add that she wasn't a human and therefore couldn't be allowed to give them commands as he and Maddy could - he didn't know enough about Sky to want to give her any power like that yet). He'd then told her and Mercy to take care of getting Sky cleaned up, fed and clothed, while he talked to Maddy in private about the situation. He'd forgotten about the alcohol for now, but it was probably better that his only human companion was sober while they discussed what Sky's arrival could mean.

  "Yeah. I don't know how she escaped, or how long ago. I want to ask her some questions once she's settled in here a bit. But she was lurking around somewhere near Sanctuary for a while."

  "So, she just wants a home, somewhere where people will accept her, from the sounds of it? We can give her that. We're just a couple of strange people in this world amassing an army of robots,
why not have an alien crossbreed with psychic powers in the group? You said she seems nice enough?"

  "She does, she's quite sweet, really," Curtis said, "I don't think she means any harm, and I want to help her, but there are a few things I'm not sure about..."

  "You'll have to enlighten me - I really can't see any problem with helping her after what she's probably been through."

  "Well, first of all, there were a couple of things she said that I didn't think much of at the time, but which, in reality, probably meant something. She said she wanted a human male to claim her, and, well, then she said something about how since she's so close to human, if she had children with a human man they'd be more human still... I know it might sound crazy but, do you think she wants me to get her pregnant?"

  Madeleine's eyebrows raised as though she was surprised this was even a question.

  "Almost certainly, but... well, we'll get back to that, what else is the matter?"

  "When she was close to Sanctuary she could tell that there were lots of humans there. She'll never believe it was just us. Her big motivator seems to be to be with humans, to side with humans. Well, if we end up in some kind of situation where it's us against Sophie or Janice or whoever else from Sanctuary, the one thing that person will have on their side compared with us is lots of humans. We don't really know what Sky can do, if anything, but if there's a chance she'll betray us later, or even if she might just try and help the other humans in Sanctuary by say, telling the androids about them, well, it'll cause problems for us."

  Madeleine looked more serious now as she thought about this, but then she spoke.

  "I think one thing could be the solution to the other, you know?"

  "I don't follow."

  "Well, if loyalty is the issue, and you think she would be more loyal to a larger group of humans because it feels more like the family she craves than us and a bunch of robots then... well, if you were the father of her children, she'd certainly feel more loyal to you, wouldn't she? She'd have her family then."