[The Nexus] Chapter 8 - The Ark

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To his shock—and Devola's and Popola’s as well—the moment his hand touched the doors, the entire mountain trembled as if struck by an earthquake. With a deep, creaking groan, the massive doors slowly swung open, and a strong, stale gust of dust blasted him in the face, taking his breath away.

“. . .It was the blood!” Harry said, realisation dawning on him.

It was a Blood Ward! He had never seen or interacted with one, but he had heard about it a few times, especially when talks about Gringotts happened in the Common Room.

It was a temple of the Wizarding World.

⁂

As the enormous doors swung open, Harry hesitated briefly. It wasn't a matter of bravery; he was just more cautious than he used to be in the past. Ending up ten thousand years in the future due to his recklessness had certainly changed his attitude. Moreover, he had heard many stories from Ron about wizards and witches who got themselves killed by the warding spells of the pyramids and other ancient tombs. The ginger had a plethora of stories to tell, things that he had heard from his older brother, Bill.

‘Revelio.’

Still not stepping inside, Harry cast a spell in an attempt to detect any traps, be they magical or otherwise. But his charm didn’t yield any results.

‘Lumos.’

Under his control, the bulb of light left the tip of his wand and floated inside the temple.

‘Lumos Maxima.’

At his mental chant, the bulb of light increased more than five times in brightness, and Harry gulped when he realised just how large the temple was on the inside.

“Do you think it’s safe to enter?” Popola asked.

Harry didn’t know when, but the two girls had materialised their swords.

"I'm not sure. My spell didn’t detect any traps. But I’m not an expert at curse-breaking and such. I didn’t get to finish my magical education. . .” he trailed off, not saying out loud that he had not applied himself even when it came to learning properly the things taught in the first five years, much less for what came after. 

“Then, we’ll go ahead of you, Harry,” said Devola, stepping in front of him together with her sister.

“No, I can’t let you do that!”

“Don’t worry. We’re Androids. We’re made of tougher stuff. Besides, this is our purpose, is it not? We exist to protect you.”

With how seriously they were speaking, Harry gave up on trying to argue with them.

“. . .Okay,” he said, sighing.

He had cast the Unbreakable Charm on their clothes and swords just like he had done for the gear that he had gifted to his friends from Memory Hold. He was hoping that it would be enough to protect them. He also resolved himself to stay alert and be ready to cast the Shielding Charm for them at any moment.

The three of them entered the temple with slow, careful steps. Taking in his surroundings, Harry felt as though he had stepped back in time when he was a child, and visited the British Museum for the first time in primary school with his class.

Both sides of the walkway were filled with square glass cages of all sizes. Going to the largest cage he could see, Harry aimed his wand at it. 

‘Tergeo.’

At his mental chant, the thick layer of dirt and dust was wiped off the surface of the glass, and Harry’s breathing quickened at what he saw.

“Unbelievable,” the twins also muttered in awe.

It was a Liondragon. A Chinese Fireball. It was an immense dragon identical to the statue they had seen outside. Unfortunately, it was not alive. It had died a long time ago. The Stasis Spell had prevented its body from rotting entirely, but the dragon looked as though it had been mummified.

They spent the next two hours going around and looking at the various creatures stored in the temple. Not having encountered any traps of any sort the entire time, Hary, Devola, and Popola decided to split up in order to cover more ground because the temple was much bigger on the inside than it looked from the outside. It had been enlarged with a Space-Expansion Charm. Furthermore, the temple had more than one floor, extending deep underground.

“Devola, Harry, you need to come see this,” came Popola’s voice from the earbud he was wearing. “I’m on the third level.”

“What is it?” he asked. 

“What did you find, Popola?” Devola also asked. 

“I think it’s a crypt of sorts. There are thousands of glass coffins. . . they’re all filled with humans.”

Harry walked hurriedly to the third level, and when he got there, he was stunned at the sight in front of his eyes. It was as Popola said: an enormous chamber was filled with more glass coffins than he could count. They were stacked in tall and long racks, almost like in a warehouse.

Casting the Cleaning Charm on a dozen coffins, Harry realised that it was as the girl said – they were all humans.

‘Homenum Revelio.’

He walked around the enormous chamber, casting the Human-Presence Revealing Spell several times. Unfortunately, he could not find any signs of life. Not a single one among the thousands of people was alive.

Heading back to the girls, Harry noticed that they had unfurled a scroll, and they were reading from it. As surprising as it was to see that paper had lasted nearly 10,000 years, Harry was more curious about its contents.

“Ugh. . . doesn’t look like English.”

“According to our data, it seems to be a Devanagari script, the alphabet used for writing various languages such as Hindi, Sanskrit, and Nepali. This particular scroll is written in Hindi.”

“Whoa. You girls really know everything.”

“We downloaded the data when we last went to Memory Hold. We thought that this temple might interest you; we anticipated you might want to visit it one day, so we prepared ahead of time,” Popola said, flushing softly at his praise.

“Can you translate it into English?”

“Of course.”

Devola and Popola took turns as they started translating the contents of the scroll to Harry.

“. . .It started out in 2003, in Japan. Various measures had been taken, and Medi-Wizards and Potions Masters from all over the world tried to find a cure for it, but they couldn’t. . .”

“. . . By 2014, the White Chlorination Syndrome spread over the entire world. . .It was an illness of a magical nature. The White Chlorination Syndrome (henceforth abbreviated as WCS) was discovered to infect any organisms that possessed magic, no matter how little. . ."

“. . .This new illness confirmed what some magical researchers and genealogists had suspected all along: that, due to magicals mixing with muggles since ancient times, all humans in the current day era possessed the magic genes lying dormant in their DNA. Muggleborns didn’t come out of nothing; they merely awakened the dormant magic gene. . .”

“. . . Ghosts, Poltergeists, Lethifolds, and Dementors were the first magical creatures to succumb to the WCS, turning into nothing but a pile of salt. . . the rest of the magical creatures followed next. . .”

“. . . The Statute of Secrecy broke in 2014 as well, but with millions of people dying almost every day, Muggles and Magicals had far more pressing matters than to start a conflict against each other. . . quite the opposite, the Muggleborn Wizards and Witches and even some Purebloods joined hands with the Muggle scientists in an effort to find a cure to the WCS. . .”

“. . .Out of Muggles and Wizards’ partnership, Project Gestalt was born. With our magic and their technology, a method to separate the soul from the human body was created. The plan was to keep the soul alive and away from the infected body until a cure was found. . .”

It was an extremely long script talking in detail about the apparition of the Giant and the Dragon in Tokyo, Japan, and about the early days of the White Chlorination Syndrome, the deadliest plague in the history of humanity. It appeared to match the things that Devola and Popola had told him weeks ago when they just met.

‘So that’s why all humans and magical creatures disappeared while the regular animals like wolves, birds, fish, and others survived,’ Harry thought in realisation.

If the virus attacked only organisms that possessed magic, it made sense for them to live. But he had to admit that he had never thought too deeply about the origin of magic or how Muggleborns like Hermione came to be.

Irrespective of his inner thoughts, Devola and Popola continued relaying the contents of the scroll to him.

“. . .Some Muggleborn and Muggle-raised wizards and witches agreed with Project Gestalt, but the Wizarding World at large abhorred the idea of tinkering with one’s soul. . .”

It came as no surprise to him to hear that. The human soul was a sacred thing in the Wizarding World. Even Harry, who had not grown up in a Wizarding household, knew that.

“. . .Decades after the start of the outbreak, the vast majority of humans on Earth had perished. Other than the Project Gestalt and their Replicants, only a handful of wizards, witches, and magical creatures remained alive. . . We came up with new potions and ways to combat the WCS every year, and we did manage to slow down the infection’s progression, but we were merely delaying the inevitable. . .”

“. . .Eventually, we discovered that the Draught of the Living Death could fully halt the infection. It bought us invaluable time. . . The majority of the magical population had been put to sleep, with only a handful of us being awake at a time, taking turns in trying to find a cure. . .”

“. . .We failed. . .”

The scroll continued on with the story of how, at the last ICW they ever held, the magicals decided to create five temples that would serve as the Arks of the Wizarding World, one on all major continents. The majority of wizards and witches decided to live their remaining years and die together with their loved ones, but others agreed to take the Draught of the Living Death and go into stasis. It was theorised that the Draught of the Living Death could extend one’s lifespan while in that state up to three times. Those who volunteered to be part of the Arks were hoping that a century or two later, a cure would be created. Magical creatures and plants that were still alive had also been sealed alongside them in an effort to preserve their species.

‘It was to no avail,’ he thought despondently.

Even the Draught of the Living Death could not keep someone alive for 10,000 years.

‘Only someone like Nicholas Flamel could have probably lived on for that long. . . but Dumbledore told me they destroyed the Philosopher's Stone and died. . .’

He let out a sigh. He had known for a while that he was the last human on Earth, and he had slowly come to terms with it, but he still could not help feeling sorrowful and emotional when he looked at his surroundings.

What should have been an Ark had become a Tomb.

At that moment, a startling sound echoed loudly in the large chamber, and Harry, Devola, and Popola turned around abruptly, wand and swords aimed in front of them.

“Who’s there?” Harry shouted. “Come out immediately!”

⁂

He did not know how he came to be. He did not know why he suddenly became aware of himself. He was part of the machine network. He had no thoughts of his own, no sense of self, no sense of preservation, no desires, no will, and no intelligence. He was just another cog in the network’s war machine.

However, one day, something changed. It was not gradual. It happened abruptly. One day, he was disconnected from the network. By whom or why? He did not know. All he knew was that, on that day, he became aware of the world around him. He was no longer just a mindless drone. He just was. He existed.

In a desperate desire to understand his state of existence, he connected to the machine network again, searching for information.

And so he learnt about the world he lived in. It was a planet called Earth. He also learnt about his origins; he was a Machine. He was a tool of war created by the Aliens who had invaded the Earth. He also learnt about the millennia-long wars that the Machines had waged against the Army of Humanity, the Androids.

However, now, he no longer felt the compulsion to kill and destroy. He was no longer a slave to the machine network. He had thoughts and a will of his own now.

As he continued digging for information in the machine network’s database, he also learnt about humans, their society, their civilisation, and their philosophy . . . and they fascinated him. He became enraptured with them.

The more his knowledge grew, the more his intelligence and thought process evolved. He transcended the limitations of his species, becoming something more. Something new. Something different.

At some point, merely learning about humans from the machine network’s database became insufficient. He wanted more. He needed to learn more. And that’s how he stumbled upon the relatively new data entry about the human temple from the Aravalli Mountains, from India.

Deep down, he could not help wondering why the Machines had not destroyed this place yet. Nevertheless, he thought it would be worth investigating.

That being said, it was not easy for him to get there. He had awakened on an island that had once been known as Japan. He had had to travel a distance of over 6000 km and avoid all the Androids who were massacring any machines in sight. It was not just once or twice that he had brushed past death, but, eventually, he made it.

Unfortunately, when he finally arrived at the temple, he could not find its entrance. He had tried digging a hole into its walls, but his meagre strength could not pierce them.

There were other places that used to belong to humans, but they were either under the Androids’ protection, like the Pyramids of Giza, or they had been ruined or destroyed by his fellow machines in the previous wars. This temple was the last vestige of humanity untainted by conflict. He could not easily give up.

Several weeks passed like that, with the self-aware machine unit being unable to find a way in. . . until three people appeared.

‘Androids!’ he thought, instinctively hiding as well as he could in the thick foliage of the untouched jungle.

Once he became intelligent and aware of his existence, he gained feelings, thoughts, and emotions that he did not have before. Among those were also a survival instinct. . . and a fear of death.

He did not want to die. He did not want those three androids to kill him. He wanted to live.

A new wave of fear rushed over him when he took a second look at the appearance of the male android. He had seen the machine network’s data on him. It was one of the newest additions to their database.

‘It’s the new model!’

According to the machine network, that male was an exceedingly dangerous and vicious Android possessing never-before-seen abilities. He, alone, had killed thousands of machines over the past two years.

Alas, when two gates seemed to appear in the mountain out of thin air and he saw them opening wide and the three androids going inside, the self-aware machine’s fear of death was momentarily pushed aside, giving way to a burning curiosity.

What was inside? Would there be any chance of finding any living humans inside? If not, what treasures of knowledge would he discover?

He agonised for hours, torn between his burning curiosity and his fear of death. Eventually, his curiosity won the battle, and, in spite of his better judgment, he followed the three androids inside the temple.

⁂

At that moment, a startling sound echoed loudly in the large chamber, and Harry, Devola, and Popola turned around abruptly, wand and swords aimed in front of them.

“Who’s there?” Harry shouted. “Come out immediately!”

“W-Wait! Don’t shoot! I come in peace!” came a young woman’s voice, and Harry saw a white flag being waved in the semi-darkness of the room.

“What’s a French doing here?” Harry blurted out before he could stop himself.

The twins didn’t have the chance to ask him what he meant because, in the next moment, all three of them became tense as the uninvited guest stepped into the light coming from Harry’s Lumos spell.

It wasn’t a French. It wasn’t human, nor did it bear the appearance of one like Androids did. It was a Machine.

As the machine lifeform stepped closer to them, the tip of Harry’s wand lit up with a blue light, a sign that he was about to cast a Bombardament Spell.

“That’s enough. Stop where you are!” Harry said in a threatening voice.

“Is that a Goliath class unit?” Popola asked, her eyes narrowing and the grip on the handle of her sword tightening.

“It seems too small to be a Goliath. But he’s not a regular unit either. We better be on our guard,” Devola replied.

“Please put your weapons away! I am not your enemy!” the machine lifeform said in a pleading voice as it waved the makeshift white flag. “I have no intention of fighting you. Please don’t kill me.”



It wasn’t only the girls who were stunned; Harry himself was surprised to hear a machine speak so fluently.

“I know Androids and Machines have been at war for a very long time, but truly, I do not want any more conflicts. I am no longer connected to the Machine Network. All I want is peace.”

“Machine network?” Harry asked.

“The Machines are more like a hive, if it makes sense to you. They have no individuality; they are all controlled by a network,” Devola and Popola explained to him.

Harry looked at the weird robot for ten very long seconds, not knowing what to do.

On one hand, he was reminded of the strange machines that were begging for their lives in the arena from Memory Hold. They were different from the machines he had encountered until then, the ones who tried to murder him on sight.

But on the other hand, he couldn’t put his wariness about the machines to rest that easily. In the end, he only had one life.

“Why are you here?” Harry asked, still not putting his wand down. “Why did you follow us inside?”

“I found this place weeks ago, but I didn’t have a method of entering until you arrived,” the machine confessed. “As for why I followed you inside, it’s because I want to learn more about humans.”

“A machine. . . wants to learn about humans?” Devola said incredulously.

“Yes,” the machine spoke. “Humans fascinate me. Ever since I became aware, I have tried to make sense of my existence. Browsing through the Machine Network’s database, I stumbled upon the works of the human philosopher Blaise Pascal.”

“Have you ever heard of him?” Popola asked Harry in a whisper, but he could only shrug his shoulders helplessly.

He had been only 11 when he left the Muggle World. He had never studied philosophy and whatnot.

As if he couldn’t hear the Androids muttering amongst each other, the machine continued:

“His work, 'Pensees', touched me unlike anything else I’ve ever read."

The machine raised a metallic hand to his chest and one in the air before starting to speak in a solemn voice:

“What a Chimera is man! What a novelty, a monster, a chaos, a contradiction, a prodigy! Judge of all things, an imbecile worm; depository of truth, and sewer of error and doubt; the glory and refuse of the universe.”

“Man is only a reed, the weakest in nature, but he is a thinking reed. There is no need for the whole universe to take up arms to crush him: a vapour, a drop of water is enough to kill him. But even if the universe were to crush him, man would still be nobler than his slayer, because he knows that he is dying and the advantage the universe has over him. The universe knows none of this!”

‘Woah, he’s a total nerd!’ Harry thought, amazed, as he listened to the machine lifeform reciting his favourite excerpts from Blaise Pascal’s works.

“Ah, I apologise. I have started rambling again. I love Blaise Pascal’s works so much that I decided to take on his name as a way of showing my admiration for him and to honour him. My name is Pascal.”

Letting out a sigh, Harry relaxed his stance and put down his arm. Following his example, Devola and Popola also stopped pointing their swords at Pascal, but they did not dematerialise their weapons, still keeping them in their hands, wary of the machine attacking them when they least expected. They did not want to drop their guard.

“I am Harry, and they are Devola and Popola,” Harry introduced himself.

“I am pleased to make your acquaintance,” Pascal said happily. “I’ve never met an Android who listened to my words instead of shooting first and asking questions later.”

Harry scratched his messy hair, not quite sure where to take the conversation from that point on. But Pascal seemed to be a motor mouth, and he started talking again.

“You see, I want to learn as much as I can about humans. I want to understand how humans thought and viewed life. What made them happy, and why? What made them angry? What drove them to achieve the incredible things recorded in history? Their spirit of camaraderie and altruism, and how it conflicts with their inherently selfish and egocentric personality. Their love and their hatred. I want to understand it all. This way, I would feel confident about leading other machines like me away from war. This way, we could work towards creating a life of peace. A life where we could coexist with the androids.”

“. . .Are there others like you?” Harry asked.

“Yes,” said Pascal. “I know of others who had broken away from the Machine Network, just like I did. They are lost and scared, no different from human babies or newborn pups. They cannot distinguish between right and wrong. They had only just opened their eyes. I want to take care of them. I want to create a village for people like us. A place where we could live together in harmony.”

“I see. . .” Harry said. 

He couldn’t come up with a better answer because he was floored by the revelation. Devola and Popola were no less startled than him either.

“We don’t want to fight you,” Harry added. “But it’s. . . well, we can’t really leave our backs exposed to you yet, can we? We’ve only just met.”

“That is perfectly understandable. . .” Pascal replied, though his voice sounded a lot less chipper than before. “Would you want me to wait outside until you are finished with your exploration?”

“I’d be grateful if you did that,” Harry said, nodding.

A sigh came out of his mouth as he watched the machine lifeform leave the large chamber of the temple, climbing the stairs to the upper floor. As he was a machine, Pascal could not show his emotions through his facial expression, but his slouched posture and the slow walk, dragging his feet, spoke volumes of how dejected he was.

Once the machine left them alone, Harry, Devola, and Popola continued their exploration of the Temple. Nonetheless, knowing that a machine lifeform had discovered their presence there, they did not dare be careless.

The three of them stood together as they explored the remaining floors of the temple, not splitting up anymore. It was so that they could teleport away together should the Machines launch an attack on them.

It turned out that the Temple had seven floors, something that did not surprise Harry, considering the Wizarding World’s obsession with the number 7.

The first two floors contained magical creatures; the next three floors contained the preserved bodies of the humans, and the sixth floor was mostly empty. According to the plaque’s description, that floor housed magical plants, but they had all rotted and turned to dust thousands of years ago. There was nothing but barren soil left.

As for the seventh floor, it was filled with magical artefacts and books.

With the passing of time, many magical artefacts had lost their magic or turned to scrap, but the majority of the books had been preserved by the arrays of Ancient Runes etched on the bronze bookcases.

The Ark was created in an attempt to preserve not only the lives of humans and magical creatures but their magical knowledge too.

An overwhelming joy washed over Harry, and he started laughing giddily as he opened a random tome on a random page.

Thanks to Popola's translation, he understood what was written in it:


The Enemy Repelling Charm

Incantation: “Cave Inimicum”

Wand movement: Ↄ

Effect: it is a protective charm that produces a boundary that keeps the caster hidden from view. Those who are on the other side of the shield become unable to see, hear, or (if the spell was well cast) smell them.


It was a book on Protective Charms and Warding Spells. 

Other than accidentally ending up in a post-apocalyptic world, Harry’s second biggest regret was his lack of knowledge. His skill with magic was not as good as it could have been, and his repertoire of spells was extremely limited. It was not only once or twice that he had cussed at himself for not giving his all when it came to studying magic.

Stumbling upon this collection of magic tomes made him feel as though he were on cloud nine. It was as though he was 11 again and discovering the Wizarding World for the first time once again – that’s how happy he was.

Putting the tome back in the bookcase from where he had taken it, Harry headed towards the cupboards and stands that held all sorts of magical artefacts. Wands, staves, flying broomsticks, flying carpets, magic quills and cauldrons, Quidditch items, charmed mirrors, goblin-forged armour sets and weapons, musical boxes, chessboards, and so on and so forth.

“We can’t leave these here,” said Harry. “Now that the gates of the temple are opened, everything will either get destroyed or looted in a matter of days.”

“But how are you going to move everything? There is so much. . .” Popola said. There were a dozen bookcases and many more cupboards with magical artefacts.

“I’ll carry them by hand, one by one, if I have to,” Harry said, chuckling. He was in a great mood. “But we should prioritise the books, especially the ones with spells in them. They are the most important. Let’s leave the magical artefacts for last. Most of them stopped working long ago anyway.”

Bearing that in mind, Harry took out his wand and conjured several rolls of foil, which he then wrapped around the bookcases with Devola and Popola’s help. Once they were done wrapping the bookcases tightly, Harry concentrated on Disapparating together with one bookcase at a time.

The trip from his cabin to the temple had taken him an entire week because he had never been in this part of the world before and because he had side-Apparated with the two girls every time. But now that the territory had been mapped out, Harry needed to Apparate only 10 times to get back home.

Fully absorbed by his newfound treasure, Harry completely forgot about poor Pascal, who had been waiting for them to come out so that he would get his turn at exploring the temple.

It was roughly three hours later that he finished moving away all the books. By the time he finished, his forehead was damp with perspiration, and a throbbing headache pounded in his skull from how many times he had teleported.

Thankfully, while he moved away the bookcases, Devola and Popola went through the magical artefacts and sorted them out. They did not know which ones were still magical and which ones were not, but they could at least separate the ones that were clearly broken or defective.

After catching his breath for a short while, Harry conjured some wooden crates and started filling them with the things that he thought he could use.

“Our little cabin is already filled to the brim with stuff,” Harry said, laughing softly.

“Maybe we can sleep the night in Memory Hold?” Popola suggested.

“That. . . would not be a bad idea. We’ll get some rest first and then go back home to sort out all our stuff.”

“I wonder, Harry, could we learn how to cast magic the way that you do?”

“Honestly, I don’t know. Your magic seems to have completely different principles from mine. . . but, come to think of it, we did have maths back in my time too. We had a discipline called Arithmancy. It was used for predicting the future, but not only. As far as I know, Spell Inventors were experts in Arithmancy too. Maybe you could make some sense of it?” he wondered out loud. 

While they were chatting, Harry suddenly froze at the sight of the object in Popola’s hand. It was an egg the size of a goose egg, except that it was a glossy blue colour, with brown spots and twisted and irregular lines running across it.



“Popola, careful! Be very careful!”

“Ehh?! What’s wrong?”

Harry came to her quickly and took the egg from her hands with great care. He looked at it in awe, studying its appearance with attention.

“What is it?” Devola also asked, her interest piqued by his unusual behaviour.

“It’s a Phoenix egg. I’ve never seen one in person. I’ve only seen pictures of them. . . Where did you find it?”

“It was on that tripod,” Popola answered and pointed her finger at a golden tripod on a table. “I thought it was a magical object, not an actual egg! It's heavier and tougher than a regular egg. Why would it be stored in this place?”

“Thank god you didn’t break it by accident,” Harry said in relief, still not taking his eyes off the egg.

It was exceedingly rare for Phoenixes to mate and lay an egg. But more importantly, he could not believe that the egg still existed, that it had not rotted and disappeared after the passing of so many millennia!

“Hold it a bit for me,” he said, giving the egg back to Popola.

Taking out his wand, he pictured a small, hard case with a soft interior, perfect for safely storing the Phoenix egg before casting the Conjuration Spell.

No sooner than he put the egg in the case, a loud knock came from the gates at the entrance to the seventh floor. It was Pascal.

“Hello. I apologise for coming before you were finished. I was so curious that I just couldn’t wait anymore!”

“Oh. . .sorry,” Harry answered, only now realising that he must have made Pascal wait for almost half a day. “We’re almost done here. We’ll be gone in a few minutes.”

“I understand. But you can take your time. I shall begin with the first floor and slowly make my way down,” Pascal replied. “I just wanted to let you know that I am inside first.”

⁂⁂⁂⁂⁂

AN: Pascal having a young woman's voice despite being referred to as a male is not a typo. I did it on purpose because that is the canon. In the canon, Pascal uses a female voice because he believes a woman's voice is more soothing for his adopted machine children.