Androids Perish in Pattaya
Chapter I: The Devils’ Paradise
It had been a strange promise—though Jun would never live long enough to reflect upon it with such clarity.
The clock struck past eight in the evening. At this hour, Pattaya Beach transformed into an entirely different creature from its daytime self. If Bangkok was the “City of Angels," then this place was undoubtedly the “City of Devils." A shoreline saturated with wicked thoughts and naked desire, rising like the sweet stench of rotting fruit. Neon light crawled to the water’s edge, and in the eyes of every passerby dwelt nothing but raw, unashamed hunger.
The most evil place on earth—and perhaps the most honest.
Amidst this tawdry carnival of flesh, Jun’s gaze had been fixed on a single point throughout the day: two women in matching red bikinis. The vivid scarlet against their snow-white skin created a contrast as beautiful and terrible as a fresh wound. Their faces remained hidden behind dark sunglasses, but they alone radiated an alien coldness that seemed to belong to another world entirely.
In the end, Jun never summoned the courage to approach them. He had spent the entire day nursing warm beer and catching glimpses of them from his peripheral vision, wallowing in yet another familiar wave of self-loathing for his cowardice.
The red of their bikinis haunted him.
The white of their skin.
The mystery behind those impenetrable lenses.
“Kep tan, juai." (Check, please.)
He was rising from his plastic chair when it happened.
Red and white materialized directly before him.
One of the women stood there. Alone.
“You… Japanese… yes?"
Her Japanese was fractured, mechanical, delivered in a tone oddly devoid of human warmth.
“Yeah… I’m Japanese," Jun managed, his voice unsteady with surprise.
“I am Anna. American."
Up close, her skin was unnaturally pale—porcelain-white, as if it had never once been kissed by sunlight. She glanced nervously around the crowded beach, then reached out and took his hand.
Her fingers were ice-cold. Not cool from the evening breeze, but cold like the touch of the dead.
“Please… I have favor."
“This… you keep. Tomorrow I come back. Same place."
Pressed into his palm was a single key, heavy and inorganic. The keychain bore strange geometric symbols—neither alphabet nor numerals he recognized.
“Wait… why me?"
“Tomorrow. Here. Six o’clock evening. Please."
Something stirred in the depths of Jun’s mind—crude, optimistic, utterly predictable.
(This could be my chance.)
A mysterious foreign woman. A secret key. A clandestine meeting at six PM on a tropical beach. Every rational instinct screamed danger, yet his heart hammered with base anticipation.
“OK, OK! Tomorrow, here at six. I’ll be here."
Then, almost as an afterthought, he voiced what had been nagging at him all day:
“But please… your face. Sunglasses… take off, please?"
Anna froze. For a heartbeat, she seemed to wrestle with some internal conflict. Then, slowly, hesitantly, she removed her dark glasses.
The face beneath defied every expectation.
No sultry seductress. No femme fatale. Just the plain, almost frightened features of a country girl—soft cheekbones, uncertain eyebrows, a mouth that seemed perpetually on the verge of an apology.
But her eyes…
Her eyes were different. Ancient. Bottomless. As if they had witnessed the slow turning of centuries, the rise and fall of civilizations, the birth and death of stars.
Anna offered him a smile so fragile it seemed it might shatter at a touch. Then she turned and walked away, her red bikini receding into the neon chaos of Pattaya’s night until she was swallowed completely by the darkness.
Jun stared down at the key in his palm, feeling its alien coldness seep through his skin. He had no way of knowing that what he held was not an invitation to pleasure, but the very instrument that would open the gates of hell.
Chapter II: The Broken Promise
Six o’clock the following evening found Jun back on the same stretch of beach, nursing a beer and watching the crowd.
Pattaya pulsed with its familiar rhythm—vulgar, alive, saturated with the heat of human desire.
But Anna did not come.
Six o’clock passed. Six-thirty. The sky began its slow transformation from gold to crimson to deep purple as the sun melted into the horizon. Jun ordered another beer, then another, staring at the mysterious keychain. The strange symbols seemed to catch and hold the fading light, glowing with an almost organic luminescence.
This was no alcohol-induced hallucination. He was really being stood up.
The irony wasn’t lost on him. After years of being the one who never showed up, who made excuses, who disappeared when things got complicated—here he was, waiting like a fool for a woman who might never have existed outside his imagination.
Alcohol dulled the sharp edges of his disappointment. Eventually, leaning back in the weathered beach chair, he drifted into an uneasy sleep.
Chapter III: The Messenger
“Oi, oniichan. Time to wake up."
The sticky Kansai dialect dragged him back to consciousness. Jun opened his eyes to find a man standing over him—Japanese, by his features, but there was something fundamentally wrong about him. Something that made every instinct scream danger.
“What do you want?"
Jun made no attempt to hide his suspicion.
“Message from Anna. Read it."
The man thrust a folded paper into Jun’s hands and stepped back, watching with eyes that held no warmth, no human recognition.
Jun unfolded the paper. The handwriting was neat, precise—far too fluent for the broken Japanese he’d heard from Anna the night before. But it was the content that made his blood run cold:
I am an android. I come from the future.
An organization is hunting me. The key you hold is my system reset activation key.
By the time you read this letter, my body will be lying dormant on the ocean floor off Koh Larn Island, near Pattaya. I have shut down my own functions and allowed myself to sink into the depths.
Please. Find my body and use that key to reboot my systems.
Embedded within my chassis is a nuclear device powerful enough to erase human civilization from existence.
The countdown has already begun. There are only days left.
You are humanity’s only hope. You alone hold the key to salvation.
I am sorry to burden you with this choice.
—Anna
Jun read it once. Then again. Then he threw back his head and laughed.
“What the hell is this supposed to be?"
An android from the future. A hidden nuclear bomb. A reset key. It read like the plot synopsis of the worst science fiction B-movie ever conceived.
There was no way that stammering, broken-Japanese girl could have written this letter. The grammar was too perfect, the vocabulary too sophisticated. And the premise itself was beyond absurd.
“Nice try," he muttered, crumpling the paper. “But I wasn’t born yesterday."
He tossed the letter into a nearby trash bin without a second thought.
The messenger watched this with something that might have been pity flickering in his dead eyes. Then, without a word, he turned and melted back into the crowd.
“This isn’t some movie," Jun told himself firmly. “The real world doesn’t work that way."
Reality was boring. Predictable. Safe.
That was what made it bearable.
Chapter IV: The Wisdom of Fools
Jun finished his beer and left Pattaya that very night. The mysterious key remained forgotten on his hotel room desk—one more piece of debris left behind by a disappointed tourist.
Life resumed its familiar patterns.
He spent several days sightseeing around Bangkok, visiting temples, sampling street food, taking photographs of everything and nothing. He took a day trip to Ayutthaya, wandering among the ancient ruins and crumbling Buddha statues.
Standing before a headless stone deity, he reflected on the nature of civilizations.
They rise. They flourish. They fall.
But they fall slowly—over centuries, millennia. Not in a matter of days. Not because some tourist failed to dive to the bottom of the ocean and reboot a fictional android.
“The world doesn’t end overnight," he murmured to the ancient stones. “Things like that only happen in movies."
Occasionally, the memory of the key would surface—the weight of it in his palm, the unnatural cold of Anna’s touch, the desperate sincerity in those ancient eyes.
And each time, a small voice in the back of his mind would whisper:
What if it was true?
Each time, he strangled that voice before it could grow stronger.
“If it were real," he reasoned, “someone else would handle it. The authorities. The military. Some hero. Not me."
He laughed at his own momentary doubt. The world was full of problems, but they were always someone else’s responsibility. That was how civilization functioned—through the division of labor, the specialization of roles.
His role was to be a tourist. To consume experiences and return home with photographs and stories.
Not to save the world.
That was someone else’s job.
Chapter V: The Sound of Silence
Three days later.
Jun sat in the window seat of his flight back to Japan, sipping lukewarm coffee from a plastic cup. Most of the other passengers were asleep, and the cabin was dim and quiet. Outside the small oval window, the night sky stretched endlessly—an ocean of stars scattered across the velvet darkness.
He was thinking about nothing in particular when the world changed.
There was no warning.
No explosion.
No screaming.
No time for fear or regret or understanding.
There was only light—absolute, overwhelming, final.
In that instant, the planet called Earth vanished from the fabric of reality, erased so completely that not even quantum echoes remained.
No one lived long enough to comprehend what was happening.
No one survived to bear witness.
No one remained to mourn.
Only silence.
Perfect, eternal, absolute silence.
Eons later, when explorers from distant galaxies survey this region of space, their instruments will detect faint gravitational anomalies—shadows where a world once spun through the cosmic dance.
Their reports will be brief, clinical:
“Evidence suggests the former existence of a planetary body in this sector. Cause of disappearance: unknown. Complete quantum-level erasure detected. Reconstruction: impossible."
They will file their data and move on.
No one will ever know.
No one will ever know that the extinction of an entire species—billions of souls, millennia of history, countless works of art and love and hope—was triggered by the simple choice of one ordinary man who decided not to believe.
His name has been erased along with everything else.
His face, his doubts, his perfectly reasonable skepticism—all consumed by the very catastrophe his indifference allowed to unfold.
Even the memory of his existence has been deleted from the universe.
There is nothing left.
Nothing at all.
Only the sound of silence, stretching across the void where a world used to be.
— END —
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