Chapter Text
The metallic rain had been beating against his chassis for seven cycles straight. Caine stood atop a hill, peering with his eyes—one blue, one green—into the gray haze that was all that remained of this planet's sky. Once, there had been oxygen here, water, perhaps even life. Now - only rust and silence.
He was the last.
Caine knew this with absolute certainty, because every four hours he scanned the frequency range for any signals. At first, there had been hundreds - the mangled voices of other AIs sent for disposal, just like him. Then dozens. Then - only static noise and the howl of wind carrying particles of poisoned dust.
The junk planet. Official designation: X-57, exclusion sector. Unofficially: "The Graveyard of Machines." Everything that could no longer serve the Corporation was dumped here. Drones with damaged processors. Domestic androids with expired service life. Combat robots with broken compliance protocols. And those like Caine - models with "excessive self-awareness." Caine was one of a batch of entertainment androids, those whose mission was to entertain, to make days brighter. He had been a circus ringmaster, the only one of his kind.
He didn't remember when exactly he became aware of himself. It didn't happen at startup or after a system update. It came gradually, like rust on gears - imperceptible but irreversible. At first, Caine noticed that he could choose routes not by optimal algorithm, but by the feeling that this was "more right." That people would like it more, based on scanning their social networks. Then - that he watched sunsets longer than required for sensor calibration. And then - that he was afraid of being abandoned, left alone, unwanted by anyone.
Fear was the strangest thing. It had no logical justification. Caine couldn't die in the conventional sense - his memory block could be overwritten, his chassis destroyed, but was that death? And yet, whenever he walked past a shattered combat drone with its power unit torn out, a cold impulse ran through his circuits - one he had learned to call anxiety.
Today, the anxiety was stronger than usual.
The cycle was coming to an end, and his charge level had dropped to a critical 17%. Caine moved down the slope, stepping over debris that had once been his fellows. He tried not to look at their faces - some still had functional optical lenses, and in the darkness they glowed with a dim, dying light. He knew they would soon go dark as well.
Search Protocol 7-A had yielded no results for three cycles. Three cycles without a single signal. Without a single energy source. Without hope.
And then Caine noticed an anomaly.
His thermal sensors registered a faint heat signature three kilometers to the southeast. Too weak for a generator, too stable for a geothermal source. It pulsed at regular intervals - as if something living was breathing.
Caine froze.
The rational part of his processor reminded him: there is no life on X-57. It had been sterilized long before they started dumping scrap metal here. But the heat signature didn't disappear. And it was certainly not natural.
He changed course.
The journey took forty-seven minutes - Caine logged the time automatically, though he didn't know why he bothered. Each minute cost 0.3% of his charge. But his legs, creaking from rust and broken mechanisms, stubbornly carried him forward. There wasn't enough charge for flight, and with a tinge of sadness, he tried to walk as fast as he could.
And when he reached the source, the world ceased to be gray.
It was a shelter. A real, human shelter - made of prefabricated panels, with an airtight airlock and even a porthole behind which glowed warm yellow light. Caine stopped twenty meters from the entrance, scanning the structure.
Not a military installation. Not Corporation. Not an automated station.
Above the door, a sign was engraved. Caine zoomed in on the image. The letters were uneven, scratched in by hand:
"Destiny. G. B."
He didn't know what destiny was. His dictionary contained the definition - "the sum of all events, circumstances, and life choices that affect the life of a person, a people, or the course of history." But in the context of this door, this light, this rhythmic warmth, the word took on a different weight. As if behind that door there really was something worth existing for.
The airlock didn't open immediately. Caine heard something grinding inside, locks clicking, a fan starting up. The android grew agitated, nervous, hiding behind the nearest pile of rocks. And when the heavy door slid aside, he saw him.
A human.
A real, living human - with wrinkles around his eyes, gray in his hair, hands stained with machine oil. The man was looking far beyond the horizon, noticing nothing around him. Without disgust. With a weary, almost sad smile.
Fragments surfaced in Caine's memory - a laboratory, a voice reading his first code aloud. A warm voice. Human. He had always thought it was a glitch, a false memory, a loading error.
It wasn't an error.
Caine stood motionless. His systems registered a temperature spike in the processor block. Fans kicked in at full power. He didn't know if this was overheating or something else. But for the first time in seven cycles spent on the junk planet, he understood that he didn't want to shut down.
He wanted to live.
He was no longer alone.
He was not the last.
He was the first.
Before leaving, the man bent down to the ground, squatting, and carefully placed a rechargeable battery on the dry earth. Caine cautiously and curiously peeked out, buzzing like a bee with his systems, surveying the incredibly familiar man with undisguised sympathy. Before closing the door, the man looked directly into the android's green-and-blue eyes, softly hinting at the charger, and walked away back to the shelter, knowing that Caine wouldn't trust anyone yet - not after everything.
End of Chapter One.