Harry was sitting in his small house, completely bored. Suddenly, his doorbell rang. He stood up and walked to the door. He opened it slightly to check who was outside. There was no one there. However, a small blue box , as blue as his eyes, lay on the floor. Harry picked it up and saw his name written on the blue cardboard. He shook it a bit, and heard nothing inside. He opened the cover and saw a little folded note. He unfolded it. It said, Move left now. Although suspicious of the note, Harry did that. Instantly, a big metal thing, that looked like a gigantic bullet, crashed through his roof and landed to his right.
Oh my God, that thing would have hit me, he thought.
A few seconds after that, Harry decided to investigate. The metal thing had a greenish color, unlike any metal he had ever seen. Harry then heard a ticking noise. He recognized the sound somewhere, but he couldn't remember exactly. At that moment, he recalled where he heard the ticking: in action movies, seconds before a terrorist bomb exploded. Harry ran out of the house as fast as he could. In about thirty seconds, an explosion tore apart his house along with other houses on his street. Harry barely had time to grasp all this when hundreds of completely circular spaceships appeared. Most of them went off in other directions, but two landed near the smoldering remains of his house. Two big robots went out of both ships. They stood near Harry's burning house, staring at it. Harry was then grabbed by a large, cold hand and felt a needle poke his neck. He did not have time to feel anything before darkness swallowed him.
Harry woke up inside a round room. There was another one of those robot-thingies in front of him. While the torso, arms and legs looked like Terminator robot parts, the head was just a big dome filled with glowing green light. Harry prepared to fight or flee, when the thing emitted a strange sound. It wasn't like anything Harry expected it to say. It was like the sound you get when you move around microphones too fast. The strange sound stopped, and the robot reached inside a table ( that was floating, much to Harry's amazement ) and took out a syringe. It wasn't like anything humans used. It was more mechanized and electronic. Suddenly, the robot grabbed Harry's shoulder, spun him around, and stabbed the back of his head. This time, Harry felt the pain.
“What is it with you and needles!?” asked Harry angrily.
“Can you hear me now, Harry Ripley?” asked the robot.
“Wait, you can talk normally?” asked Harry.
“I injected a translator into your brain. My species' language is now automatically translated into your language,” said the robot.
“What are you?”
“We are the Fleshless Ones. I am not sure what your brain is telling you right now, but our kind is named because of our non-organic bodies that house our souls.”
“Souls?”
“Yes, souls. My kind has learned that all organisms are connected through a substance called a soul. They contain every bit of information about that organism. What it is, what it does, its past, its present and, most importantly, its future.”
Harry tried to take this all in. He then asked something.
“Why am I here?”
“Because the human race needs you.”
Harry was confused. Harry suddenly thought of the movie, Terminator, again.
“I don't get it. Why did you try to kill me?”
“I was not the one who tried to kill you. I was the one who sent you the message.”
“Why did you save me then? And what am I doing here?”
“Because my kind saw your soul and we saw that you would lead a resistance against my kind in the near future.”
“Wait, if that's a bad thing for you guys, why are you trying to help me?”.
“I and others like me did not want this war. Our world's leader, the Queen, said that we had no choice. We stripped our planet of its resources and we needed more. Your planet seemed to be an excellent choice. However, we needed to eliminate the human race first. The thought of committing genocide is unacceptable to me... to my soul.”
“Why did you read my soul? What did you do, check every single human soul on this planet?”
“No, we saw this fact in the future of your commander-in-chief, Barack Obama. He said that the fate of humanity was in your hands. Our ruthless Queen then searched for your soul and saw you as the resistance leader.”
Harry was amazed that he knew the president.
“How come this Queen didn't see you help me in the future?”
“I managed to sabotage the machine that could read souls. That way, the Queen can't see what you or I will do.”
“A machine? You need a machine to read souls?”
“Yes. It is a gigantic supercomputer, capable of tapping into the soul web on a universe-wide scale. We call it the Soul Data Viewer.”
Harry took a deep breath and tried to make sense of it all.
“What's your name?” asked Harry
“Name?”
“Yeah, what are you called?”
He paused for a moment.
“Call me...Peace”.
“Alright, err, Peace, what happens now?”
“We fight, of course.”
Peace gathered some of his friends and they formulated a plan. They received news that a new machine that could read souls was going to be built. Once again, Peace had to sabotage it. He also told Harry to help.
“This mission will provide you with valuable experience in the future.” he said to Harry.
The mission seemed simple at first. One friend of Peace would cause a diversion, while Peace and Harry would infiltrate the oval facility containing the soul reader.
The first part went off without a hitch. Many patrolling guards left to investigate the diversionary explosion several streets away. Harry and Peace entered the circular facility and used bombs that were capable of short circuiting the robot bodies to knock out the guards. Freedom collected a map off one guard's internal database.
“The machine is underground. We will have to go there and use this bomb.”
Peace took out a bomb that looked like a square. After traveling through several corridors, the strike team went into an elevator that sent them underground. Upon opening the door, they saw a huge machine in the center of the gigantic room. They stepped forward but instantly, a bomb flew that exploded just like the bombs they themselves used earlier. Every one except Harry fell to the ground, stunned. A sleeker, thinner Fleshless One surrounded by a heavily armed Fleshless squad appeared.
“You must be the supposed leader of the human race. You are just as pitiable as I imagined,” said the person Harry presumed to be the Queen of the Fleshless Ones.
That is so cliché, thought Harry.
He quickly grabbed the cube bomb and rushed to the machine. The bodyguards fired at him and one shot him in the leg. Bleeding and hurt, Harry knew that he could not get away. At first he thought of giving up, when he suddenly had a vision of the human race extinct and the Earth stripped of resources.
I can't let that happen, he thought. Even if I die, as long as this machine goes with me, the human race will still have a chance.
He quickly twisted the bomb, as if it was a Rubik's cube, and threw it at the machine.
“No! You'll-”
The queen did not have a chance to complete her sentence. The bomb was not in fact a fiery explosion but more of a concussive blast, which was strong enough to rip the soul reader into unrecognizable shreds of metal. It also threw Harry back into the elevator so hard that he heard several of his bones break and he saw his blood flow. With the last of his strength, Harry pressed the “up” button of the elevator. Darkness swallowed him again.
He woke up inside Peace's ship, bruised but alive.
“If you're wondering why you're alive, my friends rescued you.”
Harry turned to face Peace, who seemed fine.
“They managed to extract both of us from the ruins. One of them managed to heal you, but I am not so lucky.”
“But you're alive.”
“Not for long. During the explosion my suit got damaged.” said Peace.
“What does that mean?”
“My race has no physical organic body. Without these suits, we would be nothing but pure souls. Also, without these suits we would dissipate and die. I don't want to die slowly. My choice is to remove my suit now.”
“Isn't there any way to save you?” asked Harry who was becoming quite distraught at what he was hearing.
“I'm afraid not. However, I know you won't give up, no matter what our leader throws at you. Goodbye, Harry.”
Peace then pressed a series of buttons around his robotic neck. A hiss was heard as oxygen entered the dome head. The glowing substance that was Peace's soul drifted outside the dome and started to die out. Suddenly, Harry stood up and repressed the buttons, causing Peace's soul to drift back inside.
“What are you doing!?” asked Peace as he went back into his body.
“You need an organic body to survive right? Is it possible for you to enter my body?”
Peace looked at Harry's blue eyes. “It is possible, yes. But we'd have to share your body.”
“ I can live with that.”
Peace then opened his dome again and his green colored soul entered Harry's body. For the third time in a row, Harry fainted. He woke up to Peace talking to him.
“Are you okay?” asked Peace, who was inside Harry.
“Never better,” replied Harry.
“What do we do know?” asked Peace.
Harry said, “We fight, of course.”
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