So this is Earth.

Nina tapped a button on her goggles, letting more light in with another filter. She craned her neck, taking in every inch of lush flora that greeted her and Bob. The pair found themselves in a circular field of waist-high grass. Bright flowers, large and small, peppered the greenery. Thick trees bordered two thirds of the field, like the ridged legs of tanned giants. The remaining third was filled with healthy saplings, sprouted from the decayed corpses of their ancestors.

Bob saw it first.

While Nina admired the branches, leaves, and sky above, Bob marched toward the fallen logs, stopping just short. At this distance, it could’ve been anything; an enormous boulder, or perhaps a larger mound of lazily stacked trunks. On closer inspection Bob surmised it to be man-made, an obscure relic in mother nature’s paradise. A sparrow suddenly flitted into Nina’s view. She squeaked her excitement and followed it through the grass with joyful abandon.

Bob!” Nina said, watching as the bird dove to her eye level and shot off in Bob’s direction. “It’s a bird, Bob! A real life bird!”

She turned to keep it in her sights but froze as she finally caught what Bob was staring at. There, half buried at the far end of the logs and wrapped in a healthy coat of overgrowth, was a gigantic, semi-rusted foot. Nina twisted a dial on her goggles and zoomed right in, bringing the foot’s intimate features into crystal clear focus. It resembled the base of a workman’s boot, the kind you could step on nails with and avoid any risk of serious injury. This boot however was entirely made of metal, and blocked the skyline at twenty five feet tall. The letters R A I K O were etched across its ridges. Nina adjusted her goggles again, a zoom and focus pull revealing other intricate sections of the metallic foot. Finally she zoomed all the way out.

“Looks like you’re not the only robot, Bob. Or at least, you weren’t.”

Nina ran past Bob and climbed up onto the fallen trunks, using younger trees for leverage. Bob followed as she pressed on through the low-hanging branches and fought her way closer to this new-found foreign object.

“It might not be a robot, Nina. Not in the way we have come to define them.”

“I know one when I see one, Bob.”

“Please, keep your distance until we can perform a more thorough examination.”

But Nina wasn’t listening. She pulled away from him and slid off the end of the horizontal logs, landing in the foot’s former print - a massive crater from which grass and other flora stretched up and wove onto the foot’s surface, creeping into every gap in its armour. Nina swung her arms to propel herself through the dense plant life and pressed her hand against the foot. Its surface was cool and rough to the touch, leaving an orange stain on her palm as she pulled it away. She examined her rusty hand before dusting the residue on her trouser leg.

“Possibly iron, or an alloy of some sort. It must have been here several years, for this level of overgrowth.” Nina arced her head back and gazed at the sky beyond the foot. She trod through the grass river to its left. As she reached a clear space beside it, she gasped. “There’s more!”

Another zoom revealed the entire length of this machine’s leg. There was that word again - RAIKO.

“Hello, Raiko.”

After a brief moment, Nina removed her goggles and let her eyes accept natural sunlight for the very first time.

“I need to get up there.” She pointed to the top of Raiko’s leg as Bob reached her side.

“It might not be safe. I strongly suggest we perform further tests, from a distance.”

“Boost me.”

“A day of testing, maybe two-”

“Boost me, Bob. I won’t ask again.”

Bob shrugged and bent at the knees, linking his fingers together to form a platform on which Nina could stand. She placed a hand on his shoulder and planted her right boot on his hands.

“Beam me up, Bobby.”

With a faint whir, Bob hoisted Nina like a Scotsman’s caber. Nina laughed hysterically as she somersaulted backwards. This was swiftly cut short as her face slammed onto the sun-kissed metal of Raiko’s thigh. With the wind knocked from her lungs and her nose a bloodied stump, Nina rolled onto her back and heaved. Her head swelled as minuscule light specks sprinkled her vision. Bob called it, Nina thought. The outside world has claimed my life in less than half an hour. Yikes. She heaved again, but the breath didn’t arrive. Finally the specks left her vision and Nina took in the cloudless sky. Another bird, larger and more impressive than the first, soared high above, riding an invisible current. Free to go wherever its heart or instincts decided. One more exaggerated gasp filled Nina’s lungs. She pressed a finger to each of her nostrils, both coming away with semi-clotted blood. She smiled and shut her eyes.

Bob landed on the metal leg with an ominous clunk and stomped to Nina’s side. He dropped to his knees and leaned over her, eclipsing the sun.

“Oh no. Oh no no no no! I have killed her. How could I have killed her?”

Nina opened her eyes.

“Cool it, Bob. I’m perfectly fine.”

“Oh… But you are bleeding. You may still die. Please, let me assess-”

“A flesh wound. I’ll survive.” Nina sat up and looked further along Raiko’s leg. She snatched her goggles and slipped them on, zooming all the way in to see the vague outline of a robotic face. “Come on, Bob, this adventure’s far from over.”

Bob held out a hand but Nina pushed off the rusted metal and stood tall. She pinched her nose and tested its flexibility, causing a few more ruby droplets to fall to her feet. With a long sniff and a rather disgusting hoick, she spat over the edge of Raiko’s leg and marched toward his gargantuan head. Bob looked to the hovering bird, a bald eagle, and followed its trajectory until it vanished beneath the tree line. His eyes drifted back to the spots of blood Nina had left behind. Crouching low, Bob touched one of the drops and lifted his fingertip to examine it more closely. As he stared, his fingertip began to glow. A moment later the blood was gone.

--

Nina sat cross-legged on the robot titan’s chin, a picture of zen. As a rough estimate, Nina guessed Raiko to be a hundred and eighty feet tall - head included. Its shoulders stretched sixty feet across, not including the sharp shoulder pads extending out a further fifteen feet.

Though it was difficult to get an accurate “big picture” view, Nina recognised Raiko’s design as something akin to a Japanese samurai, complete with a heavily detailed helmet upon its mammoth skull. Its face, chipped and worn after years of weather and wildlife damage, was a pleasant shade of lilac, with cobalt outlines around the eyes, nose, and lips. After much scrutiny, Nina discovered that the eyebrows, though in the correct position, were not made of solid lines but in fact row upon row of Japanese characters. She had earlier made a mental note to get a translation from Bob, but this note was pushed aside by a more pressing matter.

Regardless of how many times she had seen it on the projector screen, in countless TV episodes and innumerable films, nothing had prepared Nina for the soul-inspiring effect of her first sunset. Wonderment was one word for it, but in honesty she failed to find any words capable of capturing this timeless moment. I’m a neanderthal. A prehistoric dimwit, drowning in the enormity of the universe. Forget science, music, pop culture, religion. This sunset is what life is about. She watched it fall below the horizon like a molasses-covered coin, not daring to move lest she cursed all future sunsets. A shiver tickled her spine as the sun’s glow finally faded from sight.

“We need shelter.”

Nina glanced to her right where Bob now lingered, his eyes also on the dark horizon.

“Shall we return to the bunker? You can get warm and have a proper rest before we strike out in the morning.”

“No.” Nina said, hugging her arms but failing stop the shiver. “There must be a town nearby, maybe even other people. Like whoever built this bad boy.”

Nina slapped her hand on the giant robot’s face. A hollow echo rang out from below. Nina rolled to her side and pressed her cheek against Raiko’s. She knocked the metal again. Her knock returned as a muted twang. Nina sprung to her feet and slid her goggles over her head. She activated the headlight and surveyed the surface at her feet, walking across Raiko’s face. There was no visible entrance, so she continued up its forehead and dropped to her chest, leaning over the top of the enormous helmet.

On the right - Nina’s left - was the familiar crease of a latch, similar to the one on the back of Bob’s head, but large enough for a human to squeeze through. Nina tugged one of her backpack straps off her shoulder, then the other, and opened the bag. She rummaged past her assorted tools and removed the length of rope, letting it unravel down the over-sized helmet toward the latch.

“Here,” she said, offering the other end of the rope to Bob. “I’m going in.”

“It’s not s-”

“Don’t let go, Bob. That would be unsafe.”

Bob took the rope and locked his fingers around it. Nina gave the length a tug, just to be sure, then gripped it tight and dropped over the edge. She lingered there for a moment, her feet pressed against the ornate yet modern helmet, then reached into the bag and removed a hammer. She abseiled down to the side of the latch and slammed the hammer’s claws into the latch crease. She gave it a good yank, and to her surprise, the latch popped open on the first attempt. It yawned wide open, helped along with a little gravity.

Nina dipped the flashlight onto the inside of the latch door to find more Japanese inscriptions. As she shifted her head from the door to the open latch hole, something caught her eye. She froze. Three etched letters stretched across the top of the door in dull silver: M K V.

Impossible. Unfathomable. Pure coincidence. In. Con. Ceivable. Her mind flooded as the letters ricocheted in her skull, begging endless questions. Why were these the only visible English characters on an otherwise Japanese robot? Why those letters? What could they represent? Are they initials? Could they be her initials? If so, what possible involvement did she have with this machine’s existence? And to what end?

Nina had to know more. She lowered herself a few more inches and kicked away from the helmet. She swung out about a foot into the crisp air, then tucked her legs in and slipped through the open door into Raiko’s hollow mind.

--

Nina crashed into an inner wall and tumbled down, coming to a stop in a pile of grass protruding through the back of Raiko’s head. After finding her footing, Nina killed the flashlight and switched the goggles to night vision. Dusting herself off, she looked down at her legs and the tuft of grass that stretched to her hip. Why was this hole here? She knelt down and yanked the grass away. This imperfect hole wasn’t part of the robot’s design - judging by the way the thick metal bent in on itself, it appeared to be a rather large puncture wound. Nina lifted her head to the wall and was hit by an overwhelming sense of dread.

A wide gash stretched along the inside of Raiko’s skull, starting half way up and running all the way down to the hole Nina now stood in. A large, dark splotch marked the other end of the cut. Nina switched back to the flashlight and saw the splotch for what it really was. Despite the effects of time, the unmistakable image of blood splatter was illuminated on the wall. Nina shivered again, but not for the cold.

Having lingered on the dried blood for entirely too long, Nina resorted back to night vision and resumed her assessment of the robot’s brain cavity. Covering the inside of Raiko’s face was a dormant display screen which spread almost the entire way across. Below the screen was something resembling an airplane’s dashboard; a vast array of buttons, knobs, levers, and controls, each with unknown but no doubt remarkable functions. Protruding from the dashboard, and hanging almost directly above Nina, were two matching seats. Nina swallowed as she recognised more desiccated bodily fluids splashed across the backs of the seats.

“Bob!” Nina said, looking up at a row of moonlit treetops through the open latch.

A scurry of footsteps and the whoosh of a falling body revealed Bob’s feet, landing with a crunch on the inside of the doorway. He squatted and slid smoothly down beside her, stopping before the hole. Bob scanned their confines then looked to Nina.

“Something terrible happened here.”

“What could have caused this?”

Bob scrutinised the puncture wound and cut mark more closely.

“The incision is precise. It could have been made by a machine. But fragments present in the cut suggest something organic inflicted this damage.”

“You mean an animal did this? I’ve never seen anything capable of anything close to a hole this size. Granted, I’d never seen any animal in the flesh before today.”

“You said it yourself. This world holds secrets not captured in any film or book in our collection. Perhaps this machine was brought down by a creature we’ve yet to witness. Nor should we ever hope to.”

Nina sat on the edge of the hole, knees tucked to her chest, and looked up at the blood stains.

“Heavy…”

“Undoubtedly. Fortunately, if such a creature still inhabited this region, we would have felt its tremors below. The last time we felt any such movement was-”

“1998.”