SPARK OF CURIOSITY

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.”