NO LONGER A DESIGNATION

It had been six days since the bot remembered his past.

Since he told me he relayed the kill signal.

Since I felt like burying him all over again.

But I didn’t.

The truth is, something shifted after that night. Not just in him. In me. He hadn’t asked for forgiveness. He hadn’t tried to justify what he did. He just told the truth… and then sat with me in the quiet.

And that meant something.

I still didn’t trust him. Not fully. But I started watching him differently. Not like an object or a machine—but like a mirror I wasn’t ready to look into.

He didn’t try to talk much after that. Just followed me through my routines. Collected salvage. Helped reinforce the western wind-break. Adjusted the battery cells when they hummed out of tune. Always silent. Always precise.

But every once in a while… he’d do something strange.

Like one morning, I caught him staring at the photograph I kept near the cot. The one of Sarah and Edgar. My boy. The real Edgar. His face frozen in time with that wide, crooked grin—missing front tooth, hair wild from playing in the wind.

The bot tilted his head at the picture, but didn’t ask about it.

Not then.

Later that day, as we were breaking down old solar panels from a collapsed field grid, I cut my hand. Bad. The glass split straight through the glove and into my palm. I hissed and dropped the panel.

He was beside me in an instant.

Not like a reflex.

Like concern.

“You’re bleeding,” he said, reaching for the first-aid wrap from my belt without being told.

“I’m fine,” I muttered.

“I see no evidence of that,” he replied, a flicker of dry wit—barely there. I blinked at him.

He paused. “Too soon?”

I looked at him, surprised.

“You’re joking now?”

“I am… attempting.” He lowered his optics as he cleaned the wound. “I thought perhaps… lightness might be appropriate in place of silence.”

I let out a breath that wasn’t quite a laugh.

“You’re not like other bots,” I said finally.

“I am learning this.”

He finished the wrap and stood up, but lingered—hesitant. Almost awkward.

“Why did you bring me back?” he asked, voice quieter than before.

It caught me off guard. I wiped my hand on my coat.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe I needed help. Maybe I was tired of being alone. Maybe I just didn’t want to see another one of you rotting in the ground.”

He didn’t respond. Just stared into the ash-covered horizon for a long moment.

“When I was deactivated,” he said, “there was nothing. No sense of time. No dream state. Just… absence. But now, in this state—functional, aware, uncertain—it feels… like a second life.”

His voice softened.

“And that is something I did not know I could want.”

That line—something I did not know I could want—it sat heavy in my chest. Like a ghost knocking from the inside.

He turned back toward the camp without another word.

But something cracked open in me then. A warmth I hadn’t felt in years.

That night, after the fires died and the wind eased its howl, I found him standing near the graves again. My son’s stone glowed faint in the dark.

The bot knelt there. Quiet. Reverent.

And I approached him—slowly.

“Hey,” I said.

He turned, but didn’t speak.

“That picture you were looking at… that was my boy. His name was Edgar.”

He nodded. “He smiled like he understood more than he should.”