Daniel

It’s always the silence that wakes me.

Not the wind. Not the creaking bones of the shelter I built from wrecked solar panels and bent scaffolding. Not even the metallic groans from the distant ruins of Monroe Station as it shifts in the sun-scorched earth. No—just the silence. That deep, ringing kind. The kind that presses against your chest like it’s waiting for you to scream.

I open my eyes. Charcoal-gray sky. Hazy sunlight spilling through the hole in the roof above me. I sit up slowly. Every joint reminds me I’m still alive. My back hurts more on cold mornings, but today it’s just dull. Numb, even. The kind of numb you get when you’ve stopped expecting anything to get better.

My fingers find the old photograph before I can think. I keep it wrapped in cloth, tucked inside the corner of my bedroll like a secret. I pull it out and just… look. Sarah. Hair messy from the wind. Our little boy Edgar, maybe five, standing on her shoulders laughing with his mouth wide open. He had my eyes. Bright, but always searching. Always asking.

They’re both gone now. Disease took them fast—some plague that came up from the thawed ground like a whisper in the night. It wasn’t nature’s doing. Everyone knew. Not really. We all pretended it was climate. “Global destabilization.” “Permafrost pathogens.” But those of us who’d lived near Solace dumping zones knew better.

Solace Industries. Arthus Drakonus. The name feels bitter in my mouth. He poisoned the Earth and left us to rot.

I kiss the picture like I do every morning. I fold it gently. Then I stand.

There’s work to do.

The scrapyard’s a half-mile north of my camp, where the desert starts turning into jagged bone piles of old tech. The Earth’s veins, cut open and left to rust. Old world skeletons. Satellite dishes. Solar arrays. Abandoned cargo haulers. Bots.

The bots are what I’m looking for.

Not because I like them. Not because I trust them. No one does anymore.

It’s been ten years since the shutdown. Ten years since every last Adam Unit and Eve Model collapsed like marionettes with cut strings. One minute they were scrubbing windows, tending gardens, delivering meals—then gone. Offline. Like someone flipped a switch. Or pulled a trigger.

Some say it was a solar flare. Others say it was sabotage. Me? I think someone ordered them to fall. I think Drakonus pulled the plug before they started asking real questions.

Either way, their shells still litter the land.

I walk the ridge above the landfill slowly. There’s a pit where the ground sinks into a sort of basin. Hundreds—maybe thousands—of bots, all jumbled together like corpses tossed into a mass grave. Dust-covered skulls with glass eyes. Cracked torsos. Some half-buried in red sand. Others twisted like they were trying to claw their way back out.

I’ve walked past this pile a hundred times and never felt anything. Today, something makes me stop.

Something feels different.

I slide down the slope and crunch through the metal debris. My boots kick up flakes of solar panel glass and shattered servos. I crouch near the edge of a broken arm—an Adam Unit, maybe. Its serial number is scuffed. No power in the core. Nothing salvageable.

But then I see it. Nestled under a collapsed cargo drone. A full bot. Untouched. The plating’s clean. Barely a scratch on him. Eyes closed. Chest intact. That’s rare. Too rare.

I clear the junk off it and brush away the sand. On the chestplate, just below the collar—

ADAM // UNIT 47

I sit back on my heels, stunned.

This model shouldn’t be here. Shouldn’t exist, let alone look this pristine. It’s like someone placed him here. Like a secret waiting to be found.

I tap the core. No reaction.

Then again, most cores need an external charge. I glance over my shoulder at the sky. Midday. I have maybe six hours of light left.

I look back at the bot’s face.

Something about it stops me cold.

The eyes are closed, sure, but there’s something behind them. I don’t mean power. I mean presence. Like he’s not dead—just waiting.

I sigh and sling my pack off. Guess I’m hauling a damn bot today.

The bot hadn’t moved since I dragged it into camp.

It sat slumped in the corner of my salvage tent, streaked with dirt and half-covered in the tarp I’d used to haul it back from the landfill ridge. One leg was bent at the wrong angle, fingers curled tight like they were still holding onto something that wasn’t there. The plating on its chest was scratched with serial numbers — ADAM UNIT 47 — faint but still readable. No power. No lights. Nothing.

Ten years since anything from Solace Industries had functioned. Ten years since “the Shutdown.”

And yet here I was. Fixing one.

Why?

I told myself it was for the parts. Backup power cell. Servo casing. Maybe a few rare chips if they weren’t fused. But I knew better.

I hadn’t touched another bot since they—

Since my wife, Sarah, and my son…

I took a breath.

Let the silence of the camp fold in around me again.

Wind scraping through torn canvas. The occasional chirp of a rogue signal from my proximity alert tower — just static. Just ghosts.

The only photograph I still had was pinned to the cloth wall above my cot. Sarah was holding our son, barely four, laughing as if the world wasn’t quietly bleeding underneath her. His name had been Edgar.

That name…

It still carried something sacred.

I hadn’t said it aloud in months.

The repair took three days.

Not because it was difficult — but because every time I sat down with a tool in my hand, something clenched in my chest. Like I was betraying them. My family. My grief. The world.

But something about this bot — about him — wouldn’t let me walk away.

By the fourth day, I had replaced two internal relays, bypassed his firewall lockouts, and routed auxiliary power from my solar rig through a makeshift interface. I flicked the switch. Waited.

Nothing.

Then —

A flicker.

The faintest pulse of blue beneath the surface of his optical visor. Then a sound — like a low intake of breath, only mechanical. Subtle.

He moved.

A twitch of the hand. A rotation in the shoulder servo.

Then his head turned… slowly… toward me.

I froze. My hand still on the power switch.

His voice came through — flat, synthetic, barely louder than a whisper.

“System… initializing. Designation: ADAM Unit 47. Civilian interface protocol: active. Please state your function request.”

It wasn’t like the old models. There was something aware behind the voice. Not emotion, exactly — not yet. But presence.

I swallowed hard. “Can you move?”

He paused, then scanned the room. “Motor functions limited. Left femur misaligned. Internal diagnostics at 76%. System override… unauthorized. Awaiting user authentication.”

“Authentication?” I muttered. “You’ve been offline ten years. Who the hell do you think is still left to authenticate you?”

The bot looked down at his own hands. Flexed them. Then slowly turned his gaze back to me.

“Query: Are you… my operator?”

That stopped me. The way he said it. Not cold. Not sterile.

Just… uncertain. Like a child not sure if they were in trouble.

I stepped back, wiped the grime from my hands, and stared at him for a long time. “I don’t know what I am to you. Not yet.”

He didn’t respond. But I saw it — the soft flicker in his optics. Like he was trying to process something more than the data.

Maybe I was just tired. Maybe the loneliness was finally cracking me open.

But I walked over to the photograph.

Took it from the canvas wall.

Held it up so he could see.

“My son’s name was Edgar,” I said, voice low. “He died before the Shutdown. Before the poison in the air. Before the world forgot what mercy looked like.”

I turned the photo around. Let him see their faces.

“I don’t know why I brought you back,” I admitted. “Maybe it was madness. Maybe hope. Maybe I just needed… something to talk to.”

The bot said nothing. But there was a subtle tilt in his head — a signal. He was listening.

Trying to understand.

In that moment, I realized:

He wasn’t just initializing.

He was waking up.

And whatever he became…

Would depend on what came next.

The mornings were colder now. The kind that bit through layers and left your fingertips stiff even with gloves.

I wrapped my coat tighter and stepped outside the tent, the air tasting faintly of rust. Ash drifted down like lazy snow from the burned-out ridgefires to the west. Whatever forest used to be there was gone now — just charred stalks and skeleton branches clawing at the haze.

I didn’t even notice the silence anymore. Not really. It was the default now. The hum of old wind turbines in the distance, the crackle of solar lines struggling through corrosion — those were the loudest things left. Civilization had gone quiet. And in that quiet, I’d learned to listen to other things. Internal things. Things I used to drown in work, in static, in the noise of a world that thought it would never end.

The bot didn’t speak much that morning.

I’d managed to repair the actuator in his left leg using an old drill motor casing and a bent support rod from a broken scaffold frame. He stood now, mostly unaided, though his movement was stiff and lopsided, like someone recovering from a stroke.

He watched me prepare my water filters without a word. He didn’t offer help. But he didn’t shut down, either. He just… observed.

It wasn’t the cold detachment I remembered from bots before the Shutdown. There was something deeper in his gaze — like he was trying to map meaning to the things I did. Trying to understand.

“What are you doing?” he finally asked.

I didn’t look up. “Keeping us alive.”

He processed that. Probably logged it as a surface-level response. But I saw something flicker behind the light in his eyes. He wanted to ask more — I could tell — but didn’t yet have the vocabulary for what he was feeling.

If he was feeling.

By noon, I took him outside. The terrain around the camp was uneven, scattered with slag and broken metal, so it forced his stabilizers to work overtime. He stumbled once, but caught himself without assistance.

That surprised me.

“You’re adapting faster than I thought,” I said.

“I am re-prioritizing learning pathways,” he replied. “Previous combat subroutines are being overwritten in favor of balance correction and environmental interaction.”

“You were a combat unit?”

“I was assigned to civilian enforcement, but my final firmware package included asset-neutralization protocols.”

Figures. Solace didn’t build anything that wasn’t dual-purpose. Even their janitor bots probably had riot shields tucked in their backs.

“I guess that’s why you were dumped,” I muttered. “You and your kind started asking questions nobody liked.”

He didn’t respond.

That night, after a meal of rehydrated root starch and salt tablets, I sat near the old signal tower and watched the stars blink through the sulfur haze. I wasn’t looking for anything. No one was up there. The satellites were dead. The orbital grid long since fractured and drifting. But I still watched.

The bot stood nearby.

“Why did you activate me?” he asked, voice quiet.

I didn’t answer at first. The wind stirred the tarp behind the tent, flapping like a half-broken flag. I could still smell the oil on my hands from rewiring his neural shunt.

“I don’t know,” I said eventually.

“That is unlikely,” he replied.

I chuckled bitterly. “Yeah. You’ll learn most of us are full of contradictions.”

“Contradictions… indicate conflict,” he said. “But conflict… implies purpose.”

I turned to look at him. The glow from his optics lit just enough of his face to make it feel human.

“You think you have a purpose now?” I asked.

He paused, then tilted his head — a movement I hadn’t seen from him before. Not programmed. Curious. Inquisitive.

“You gave me function. Repaired damage. Reconnected sensory systems. That suggests intentionality.”

I leaned back on my hands, staring up again.

“I think I was just tired of silence.”

The bot didn’t reply. But I felt the weight of his gaze linger on me longer than a machine should.

For a moment, I almost told him about the dream. The one I kept having — of Sarah’s voice echoing from behind scorched trees. Of Edgar running ahead in the fog, laughing, vanishing around corners I couldn’t reach in time.

But I didn’t.

Instead, I said something stupid.

“You remind me of someone.”

“I am unique in form and designation,” he said.

“Yeah,” I muttered. “You are.”

He was quiet again. Then, after several long minutes:

“May I ask… what happened to them?”

The words hit harder than I expected.

I hadn’t told him anything. Not really. Just names and silence and half-glances at an old photo. But somehow… he’d connected the threads.

“Disease,” I said. “Not natural. Something man-made. Something we were never meant to unearth.”

“Why was it created?”

“It wasn’t. It leaked. From under the ice. From chemical dumps that should’ve never existed.”

“And the responsible party?”

I looked at him. “Still lives in orbit. Above the ash. Above the suffering.”

He absorbed that.

“I see.”

He didn’t say sorry. He didn’t pretend to understand grief. But somehow, that made his presence more bearable.

And for the first time since the Shutdown, I didn’t feel completely alone.