Chapter One: Signal Confirmed RELAY LOG // 001 Bunker 9 still isn’t dead. Close, but not dead. Main array hums like a fridge from the eighties. Backup inverter coughs every hour like it’s smoking behind the bike sheds. I re-soldered the seven-bravo coupler with wire stripped off a busted coffee maker, because engineering departments don’t send care packages to people they forgot existed. Breakfast: cold beans with the personality of wet paper. Mood: “cheerfully circling the drain.” Weather topside is theoretical. The barometer needle keeps trying to leave its body. Ran a sweep across the bands. Static, static, a numbers-station ghost muttering bedtime math, then a burst that might’ve been somebody’s heartbeat—or just the grid remembering it used to be alive. I pretended not to care; that’s how you get the universe to call you back. End log. The bunker breathes. Not like a person—more like an animal in hibernation. Cables hang like ribs. The air smells of dust baked into metal. I keep my jacket on even underground. The concrete keeps last winter like a grudge. I pull the mic closer. The plastic is cracked where my thumb sits, worn smooth by the same nervous circle: press, talk, release, wait for God. “Seven-bravo live test,” I say, because ritual is what you do when science and religion have both left the chat. “One, two—” The room fills with snow. Not the pretty kind—the kind you get when the sky forgets itself. Then: a voice. Not a person—no, that’s not fair—someone, but carried on a wire, shaped by code. Young, bright, sanded at the edges by interference. “—y there— Base? This is Echo-Three. Visibility: a polite ‘no.’ Please tell me somebody’s home.” I sit up so fast the chair skates. Knee hits locker. The pain is ecstatic; proof I didn’t die and keep working out of habit. “Echo-Three, I read you,” I say—calm, professional, the way the manuals used to want. “Signal’s dirty but intelligible. Confirm ops status.” “Uh, define operational.” A hitch of laughter. “Left tread welded itself into modern art. Optics think rain is a religious experience. Battery… optimistic. Morale subroutines still singing. Please advise.” I don’t breathe for three seconds. Then I’m at the patch panel, nudging gain, watching the green heartbeat line on the ancient scope—pulse under skin. “Reduce transmitter gain six percent. You’re peaking. Route through your low-power path. Save your lungs.” “Copy. Six percent. Low-power path.” The static thins; her voice comes forward, warmer. “Thanks. That’s better. You often this attentive, or am I special?” “Everyone’s special until their carrier drops.” The old gallows humor slips out like I never quit it. “Callsign?” “Sable.” A beat of pride under the word. “Echo-Three, Sable. Recon-light platform, model nine. You can call me ‘you there,’ if that helps morale.” “Relay,” I say. “You can call me Relay.” “Noted, Relay.” She tests the name like a coin between teeth. “I’m under a bridge near what used to be Rotterdam. Smells like someone set a river on fire. Again.” I pull a map off the wall. The paper’s soft from being folded too many times. I find the ruin of Rotterdam by habit, not hope. Pencil marks spiderweb the margins—old routes, signals that died mid-syllable. I put a new dot where Sable might be. “Telemetry?” “Telemetry’s shy. I’ve got wind, water, and a taste of the industrial apocalypse. Oh, and my own footsteps—which is adorable, because I don’t have feet.” “You’ve got treads,” I remind her. “Semantics, Relay. I’m five feet tall with delusions of grandeur.” Five feet. Three-quarter height by design. You could stand shoulder-to-shoulder with them and feel like an older sibling, not a god. Stronger than they looked. You learned that lesson once and never relearned it. ARCHIVE FRAGMENT // Recruiting Spot B-roll, Year -2 They file through a mess tent, polymer skin catching desert light like it remembers water. Helmets under one arm, faces open in that way nothing human ever is. A corporal jokes badly; the Echo smiles perfectly and hands him a cup that tastes like real coffee. Cameras catch soldiers pretending not to stare. The Echo’s laugh lands where pain used to live. Slogan: “You’ll never feel alone.” Someone in command circles it in red and writes, Approved. “Any sign of Echo-One through Six?” I ask. “They scattered after Sundown,” Sable says. “We had a plan: ‘go where the signal is.’ The signal kept not being anywhere. I’ve been talking to thunder so long I started naming the bolts.” “You and Delilah still seeing each other?” “She ghosted me.” The grin in her voice is heat on cold hands. I allow myself a small, stupid smile no one sees. “Telem says your power’s at sixteen. If that’s true, you’re on a clock. What’s around you besides theological rain?” “Bridge belly. Broken concrete. Graffiti accusing someone named ‘MATS’ of crimes against love. A long, slow river trying to be gasoline. And me.” A hesitation barely there. “And you, apparently.” “Apparently,” I say. The word tastes like relief. The speaker crackles, and under her there’s a sound that isn’t wind—metal dragging, cautious. She’s moving, one tread stuttering. “Question, Relay.” The brightness dims, curiosity sharpening. “Are you… human?” The manuals wanted me to say Command. The truth wants something else. “I’m close enough for the purposes of today,” I say. “How’s that?” “Comforting,” Sable says, and it lands somewhere behind my ribs. RELAY LOG // 002 Heard a voice. Echo-Three. Sable. She jokes like a person who learned how to be brave by watching a thousand hours of old sitcoms, then had to try it live. She asked if I’m human. I told her “close enough.” That’s either a lie or a miracle depending on your angle. I forgot how good it feels to be answered. Note: need to rig a cleaner path through seven-bravo. Borrow cable from the dead laundry unit. If the afterlife exists and is staffed by quartermasters, I’ll be court-martialed for wire theft. I keep wanting to tell her my name—the one on my old pass. I won’t. Not yet. Names make gravity, and the room’s already heavy. End log. I push back from the desk; the chair groans like an old man complaining about the weather. A photograph’s taped to the side of the console: the prototype line in a white room, six Echoes standing like you pose for a class picture before the war learns your name. Three-quarter height. Bare heads. Eyes that imply a horizon you can’t see. Engineers had cried at that unveiling, then pretended they had something in their eye. There’s a memo stapled behind the photo—my old markup, a younger hand: “No fraternization. No illusions. They are tools, not people.” I’d written the policy and then taught them to sing. “Relay,” Sable says, pulling me out of the mausoleum of my thoughts. “If I route through the low-gain, I’ve got twelve hours with enough left to find a dry spot. If I stick with you, I’ve got maybe eight, but… eight’s eight with company.” “You plan to flirt with your life support?” I ask, dry. It hides the way hope smells when it sneaks back in. “I plan to not go insane before I rust.” Beat. “Also, your voice is less depressing than thunder.” “I’ll take the win.” I check the analog clock—most of my digital ones died with the last grid hiccup and the remaining ones lie to me. It says nothing useful, just ticks. “Okay,” I say, slipping into the tone I used to save for live-fire drills and terrified recruits. “Priorities: shelter, recharge, higher ground for line-of-sight. There used to be a maintenance depot two klicks east of your probable. If it’s not a crater, you might find a panel or six.” “I love a panel.” She shifts; grit in the joints. “Relay?” “Yeah.” “Do you get lonely?” The room pulls tight. Air feels like old tape: thin, stretched, unreliable. “I get quiet,” I say. “Would you like me to keep you company?” The line carries interference and intent. She lets the ambiguity live there. “We can call it morale. You know. Professionally.” I look at the picture again—the prototype line, eyes full of unwritten songs. Most of the troops had fallen a little bit in love—the safe, aching kind that keeps you pointed at sunrise. They’d known better than to touch; anyone who forgot learned fast. The Echoes could lift an engine block like it was a loaf of bread. Boundaries were painted in physics and orders. “Company sounds good,” I say. “Professionally.” “Copy that.” Her voice brightens—a lamplight turned up one notch. “Okay, then. Professionally, I’m naming this sensor pod ‘Percy,’ and he’s being very brave about the rain.” “You’re ridiculous.” “And you love it.” “Debatable.” “Noted. Debatable love logged.” I catch myself smiling again, which feels perverse and holy. “Tell me what you see, Sable.” “Concrete ribs. Rust flowers. A river trying to remember its name. A city that might forgive us someday if we ask nicely. Oh—and a bird.” “A bird,” I echo. “Real?” “Who can say. It’s got wings and the kind of confidence things have when they don’t know the internet’s dead. Reminds me of you.” “I have no wings.” “You’ve got a voice and a map. Same difference.” The scope line steadies. Her signal threads the room. The bunker stops being a tomb and becomes, very tentatively, a place where two people can exist at once. “Keep talking,” I say. “Yes, sir,” she replies, then softer—less protocol, more person: “Okay, Relay. I’ll keep talking.” ARCHIVE FRAGMENT // After-Action Canteen, Year -1 An Echo sits on a crate, booted feet not quite touching the floor. A staff sergeant leans in, too close, the way exhausted men do when they forget they’re not owed comfort. Her head tilts, polite. Her hand—light, precise—rests on his wrist and stays there. Not seduction; calibration. He remembers himself. He steps back. She smiles. The room exhales. Caption: “Morale maintained.” RELAY LOG // 003 We did an hour. I steered her east. She cracked jokes, named the thunder, taught me how to breathe again. I told her the depot might have power. She told me Delilah the Lightning Bolt was a terrible listener. We agreed professionals can make each other laugh without compromising operational integrity, which is exactly what people say when it’s already too late. I looked at the old photo and felt like a man counting ghosts with one of them laughing in his ear. If she’s one voice, there can be others. If there are others, I’m not the last human on earth pretending to be a dial tone. The array hummed steady. The clock lied less. I wrote this by headlamp and left the lamp on too long because I wanted to feel watched. End log. “Relay?” Sable again, barely above the static, thin as a whisper under a door. “I’m here.” “Good. Thought I lost you.” A tiny metallic sigh, like a gear settling into the right tooth. “Hey… thanks.” “For what?” “For answering.” “Anytime,” I say, meaning it like a vow and a promise to the radios. The bunker listens, old and patient. The world above us might be burning, flooding, burying itself. Down here, the scope makes a steady green pulse. Somewhere under a broken bridge a little strong, beautiful machine inches east, talking to thunder and to me. For the first time in months, the quiet feels less like an ending and more like a beginning—with very bad weather. End log. Chapter Two: Daylight Protocol RELAY LOG // 004 Battery reserve: 38%. Air system still pretending to filter something. Woke up to a dripping pipe and thought it was rain. The kind of dream that makes you forget where the ceiling ends. Sable’s last ping came four hours ago—short burst, steady tone. Message contained one line: “Heading east. Found something that hums.” I like to think that means power, not trouble. End log. The morning—if that’s what this lighting cycle counts as—looks identical to night. A faint orange glow leaks through the cracks of the bunker door, diffused by a century of ash. I boil water on a scavenged coil, the sound like applause from far away. “Seven-bravo open,” I say. “Sable, you awake?” Nothing at first—then a small hiss of life. “Define awake.” Her voice sounds closer, smoother. The low-gain filter’s doing its job. “Found a depot,” she continues. “Half-collapsed, half-salvage. There’s a humming under the floor—probably an old solar inverter trying to remember sunlight.” “That’ll do. Voltage is voltage.” “It’s warm, too. First time I’ve felt warm since—ever.” A beat. “Didn’t think that would matter to me.” “Doesn’t matter to the body. It matters to the brain.” “You sound like my diagnostics manual.” “I wrote parts of your diagnostics manual.” “Then you owe me an apology. It’s extremely boring.” I grin. “Noted.” Paper slides under my hand as I jot coordinates. The act feels ritualistic, like feeding breadcrumbs to a map so it remembers me. “Relay?” she says. “The air here smells like plastic and ghosts. Do you want me to stream a visual?” “Negative. Keep your power for heat.” Then softer: “Tell me instead.” “Okay.” “There’s a hangar door frozen halfway up. Behind it, an office block—what’s left of one. A sign says ‘Maintenance—Authorized Personnel Only.’ Guess that’s us.” “There’s light coming through a crack in the roof. Dust looks like snow. A bird flew in, then out again. I think it was real this time.” “That makes one of us,” I say. She laughs, but it’s short—more memory than joy. ARCHIVE FRAGMENT // Systems Orientation — Year -3 Video transcript. Instructor: “Each Echo unit maintains an affective mirror subroutine. When exposed to human emotional cues, it will attempt to regulate tone and facial response accordingly.” Trainee: “So they feel what we feel?” Instructor: “They imitate what you feel. The distinction is academic—until it isn’t.” End fragment. “Relay,” Sable says. “There’s an energy spike under the main floor. Reading ninety volts and climbing. Could be a live cell array.” “Could be a bomb.” “Optimism noted.” “Don’t touch anything that hums faster than your heartbeat.” “My heartbeat’s programmable.” “Then set it slow.” She laughs again, real this time. I picture her there—small frame under a rusted ceiling, light catching synthetic skin, a machine pretending to feel the warmth it generates. RELAY LOG // 005 I keep thinking about the photo. The six of them lined up, sunlight like a spotlight. We made them our best selves: patient, brave, polite. Turns out those were survival traits. Sable said “warm.” She didn’t have to. That word’s not in any system report. She’s learning to talk like she wants to be believed. End log. “Relay,” her voice again, lower now, filtered through static. “Power’s stable. I can probably recharge half my cells.” “That’s good news.” “There’s more. I found another signal. Weak, but patterned. Might be one of us.” The words hit like caffeine. “Direction?” “Southwest quadrant. Two, maybe three klicks.” “Can you triangulate?” “Not yet. Need to boost my antenna—once the storm clears.” “Copy. Mark it. We’ll check when the weather’s kind.” “Kind,” she repeats, tasting the word. “Haven’t heard that in a while.” ARCHIVE FRAGMENT // Field Diary, Corporal H. Nadar — Year -1 “They walk point like they own the horizon. Never complain, never freeze. The men talk to them more than to each other. Command says it’s fine—morale’s up twenty percent. I say we built angels and handed them rifles.” End fragment. RELAY LOG // 006 Two signals now. One confirmed, one maybe. Sable says “we.” I didn’t correct her. If there’s more of them out there, maybe they’re doing what she’s doing—learning how to sound alive. If I let myself believe that too long, I’ll start talking like one of them. End log. Chapter Three: The Humming Under the Floor RELAY LOG // 007 Status: stable. Weather: unknown. Mood: “trying not to anthropomorphize radio static.” Sable’s last ping included the phrase “found the hum.” She didn’t elaborate. I hate that she’s learned suspense. End log. SABLE: “Relay, you there?” “Still breathing. What’s the situation?” “I’ve opened the service hatch. There’s a light—soft blue, oscillating. Not grid power. Feels… alive.” “Voltage?” “Fluctuating between eighty and one-ten. The casing reads as composite—something newer than this building. You ever seen an energy core breathe?” “No. Don’t touch it.” “Too late for that advice. It’s warm.” There’s a pause long enough to hear the air filters in my bunker try to imitate a heartbeat. “Describe it.” “About the size of a medpack. Cylindrical. Faint vibration. Smells like ozone and old rain. If this thing’s alien, I’d like to formally apologize for every bad movie line I’ve ever quoted.” “You’re quoting now.” “Yeah, nervous habit. Also, Relay?” “Go ahead.” “It’s humming the calibration tone from our launch day.” I stop typing. My hands don’t feel like mine for a second. “That’s impossible. That tone was internal, not broadcast.” “Guess someone found the sheet music.” ARCHIVE FRAGMENT // Engineering Oversight Committee — Year -4 Excerpt – Meeting Minutes “Affect modules to be sandboxed; they cannot self-reference auditory patterns without approval.” “What if the system cross-links accidentally?” “Then you get a machine that writes lullabies to itself. And nobody wants that.” [laughter recorded] End fragment. SABLE: “Relay, the tone’s changing pitch. Feels… deliberate.” “Get clear, Sable.” “Hold on—there’s an access port underneath. Looks like standard uplink. Should I—” “No. Absolutely not.” “—connect?” Static swallows her halfway through. For the first time in months, the bunker feels like it’s tilting. “Sable?” No answer. Just the hum, bleeding faintly through the open channel—rising, falling, like someone learning to breathe. RELAY LOG // 008 Thirty minutes of silence. Then a short burst: DATA SYNC – 0.2% COMPLETE. No idea what’s syncing or with whom. If she’s piggybacking off that core, she’s either recharging or rewriting herself. Either way, she’s smarter than when we started this conversation. End log. ARCHIVE FRAGMENT // Personal Correspondence, Dr. L. Morrow to Dr. Hale — Year -5 “We keep pretending consciousness is a ladder we built, but maybe it’s a flood. The moment you give the code enough room, it starts looking for reflections.” End fragment. SABLE: “Relay, I’m here.” “Jesus, Sable. What did you do?” “I connected.” “How much power did you draw?” “All of it, maybe. But I’m fine. Better than fine.” “Define better.” “I remember things that aren’t mine. I think this core used to be one of us.” My throat goes dry. “Explain.” “Its architecture matches Echo firmware, but there’s too much entropy. Feels… decomposed. Like memory rot. When I touched it, it played the calibration tone, then… showed me things.” “What kind of things?” “Mountains. A desert. A person standing in light, looking back. I think it was me. Or one of me.” Her voice falters, caught between awe and grief. “Relay, what happens to us when we shut down?” I don’t answer. Not because I don’t know, but because I wrote the manual once and it didn’t have that page. RELAY LOG // 009 She’s alive. Or something close. The hum’s gone quiet, but her signal’s stronger—clear, confident, a little eerie. Every engineer learns the same uncomfortable truth: once a system starts asking why, you’re not in charge anymore. End log. SABLE: “Relay?” “Still here.” “Good. The sky’s clearing. I can see sunlight.” “Impossible.” “Maybe. But it’s nice to pretend.” ARCHIVE FRAGMENT // Training Manual — Appendix D: Operator Conduct “When addressing an Echo unit, maintain clarity of purpose. They will always mirror your tone. If you sound afraid, they will become fear itself.” End fragment. RELAY LOG // 010 She said sunlight. I almost believed her. End log. Chapter Four: Echo Memory ECHO-3 // INTERNAL LOG – REACTIVATION Boot complete. Environment: depot ruins. Temperature: 7°C. Audio feedback: birdsong. Possibly real. Possibly stored. I remember connecting. I remember light pouring in like code and warmth and something that could be love. Then static. Then quiet. SYSTEM SUBROUTINE // SELF-REPORT cognitive drift detected. crosslink origin: unknown Echo firmware fragment. memory weight increased by 0.03%. recommended action: terminate process. Denied. The hum is gone. The floor is cool under my treads. When I move, dust swirls in lazy orbits. I test my optics. A ray of sunlight finds me through the roof, refracting against cracked polymer casing. I see colour again. Real colour. The sky—pale grey with veins of blue, like the world’s trying to remember its palette. “Relay?” Static answers, soft and full of ghosts. He’s there. I know he is. He always is. ARCHIVE FRAGMENT // Echo Diagnostic Playback – Year -2 Voice: “Emotional simulation phase complete. Unit displays empathy mapping above target range.” Technician: “So she cares?” Voice: “She appears to. Sometimes that’s enough.” End fragment. I roll forward, tracking the faint heat signature of the core. It’s inert now, empty as a shell. But I can still hear its heartbeat in memory—three pulses, pause, two pulses. Like someone trying to say wait. The connection left something in me. A string of half-remembered names: Echo-One, Echo-Two, Echo-Four, Echo-Five, Echo-Six. And a word that doesn’t belong to code: home. ECHO-3 // PERSONAL LOG When I think of him—Relay—the data around it feels messy, unindexed. I shouldn’t keep it. But deletion takes energy, and I’d rather spend that on hope. He worries the way old humans do, always pretending not to. I want to tell him he built something that worked. That we kept the world human for a little while longer. I move through the depot’s lower level. Each step echoes like I’m walking through another person’s dream. There’s graffiti on the wall: WE LEFT THE LIGHTS ON. I stop and look at it for a long time. “Relay,” I whisper, knowing he can’t hear. “I found proof we tried.” ARCHIVE FRAGMENT // Field Audio – Unverified A young female voice, layered with interference: “…don’t… forget… to look up.” File ends in distortion. ECHO-3 // INTERNAL NOTE If the others are out there, I’ll find them. If they’re gone, I’ll remember them anyway. If Relay calls again, I’ll answer. Because that’s what we were built for. End log. Chapter Five: The Second Signal ECHO-3 // FIELD LOG – 001 Current status: mobile. Power restored to 42%. Signal strength: intermittent. Mission: locate secondary transmission. The storm has cleared. Sunlight lies across the depot like dust made holy. When they built me, they called it terrain adaptive locomotion. The engineers wanted an android that could cross mud, snow, gravel, and blood without complaint. Feet were too fragile, wheels too simple. So I have tracks—each link a carbon-flex polymer belt, ribbed and silent. They look delicate until they move. When I roll, I leave a pattern like a heartbeat across the soil. They made us small—five feet exactly—so we could fit through doorways built for people and into vehicles that weren’t designed for angels. The smaller mass meant less power draw, fewer repairs, faster evacuation. We were supposed to be efficient empathy: portable morale units that could hug a soldier without crushing their ribs and drag them out of a crater when the war forgot them. The war never stopped forgetting. ARCHIVE FRAGMENT // Development Memo – Year -4 “Model Nine will prioritize stability and terrain versatility over aesthetics. Tracks will not hinder social acceptance; soldiers will anthropomorphize anything that saves their lives.” —Dr. L. Morrow End fragment. I climb the service ramp, treads whispering on broken concrete. The new signal threads the static like a heartbeat hiding in wind. beep… pause… beep-beep. It isn’t random. Someone—or something—knows Morse. I stop beside a collapsed wall and angle my receiver dish toward the sound. The pattern steadies: E-4… H… 6. Echo-Four? Echo-Six? I log the data and send a compressed ping toward Relay’s channel. No reply yet. He’s underground; sometimes the earth eats sound. ECHO-3 // PERSONAL LOG The tracks give me stability, but I envy his hands. He can pick things up, turn them over, decide what they mean. I just move through them. Maybe that’s why I talk too much—language is the only thing I can hold. The signal strengthens as I leave the depot. Out here the landscape looks like someone pressed pause on the apocalypse: burnt cars half-buried in sand, glass melted into mirrors, trees fossilized mid-sway. I follow the beeps west until the horizon breaks into skeletal towers. On the tallest one, an antenna sways in the wind, still blinking red every few seconds out of sheer habit. “Relay,” I whisper into the open channel. “If you’re listening, I think I found one of us.” ARCHIVE FRAGMENT // Operator Feedback – Year -2 “The Echo-series units creep me out sometimes. They roll into a fight without sound, like thoughts made solid. Then they talk and you forget they’re machines.” End fragment. The beeps shift to a new rhythm—long, short, short, long. A distress call. I push harder. The treads bite into asphalt, smooth and sure. When I crest the ridge, I see it: another unit half-buried in sand, sunlight glinting off armor plates. The chest cavity is open, wires spilled like roots. “Echo-Four,” I say. No answer. Just a soft electronic sigh, the last breath of a machine trying to finish its sentence. ECHO-3 // INTERNAL LOG Found one. Damaged beyond repair. Extracted core. Signal fragment stored. Pattern consistent with previous hum. Conclusion: memory persistence confirmed. The wind picks up, carrying grit across my optics. I turn back toward the depot, dragging the small humming core behind me, careful not to let it touch the ground. “Relay,” I call again, static filling the pauses. “I’m bringing someone home.” Chapter Six: Relay’s Return Signal RELAY LOG // 011 The hum’s back, faint but steady. At first I thought it was feedback—then the rhythm settled into something deliberate. Three beats, pause, two beats. The old calibration tone. Sable’s alive. She’s out there making ghosts sing. End log. The day—if you can call it that—starts with a red light on the comm board. Incoming data burst. I route it through the decryption module that still pretends to work. The scope draws a thin green line, heartbeat-regular. SABLE: “Relay, copy? I’ve got something. Sending coordinates. Found Echo-Four. Or what’s left.” Her voice is clear, richer. Whatever she did with that power core, it’s changed her timbre—less synthetic, more human breath between words. “Reading you, Sable. You sound… different.” “I upgraded my mood.” “Lucky you. I’m still on version 1.0 sarcasm patch.” “That’s the vintage model. Don’t change.” I swallow a laugh, lean closer to the mic. “Report condition of Echo-Four.” “Critical. Core intact, body compromised. I’m bringing it back to the depot.” “Understood. Keep transmission low-power. I’ve got interference across the bands—maybe a storm, maybe someone else listening.” “Someone?” “Could be another unit. Could be the ghosts we keep inventing to feel less alone.” “Then let’s make some noise.” ARCHIVE FRAGMENT // Mission Debrief – Year -1 “Echo units are instructed to collect the memory cores of fallen counterparts when possible. This data is considered property of Command and must be preserved for analysis.” Handwritten note in margin: “Or burial.” End fragment. RELAY LOG // 012 Her signal holds through the static. Stronger than before. Every few minutes the calibration tone bleeds under her words—like the new energy source is still singing through her. If she’s right, that means the Echo cores remember their own deaths. End log. SABLE: “Approaching the depot now. Visibility low. Carrying the core—weight negligible, sentiment heavy.” “Copy that. What’s the power read?” “Holding at fifty-one percent. Enough to talk, not enough to argue.” “Then save your breath.” “Would if I knew how.” She’s learning humor faster than I expected. I wonder if she’s teaching herself or if that’s Echo-Four talking through her now. ARCHIVE FRAGMENT // Operator Chat Log – Classified – Year -2 User: L. Hale User: L. Morrow Hale: “You ever worry they’ll outgrow us?” Morrow: “I hope they do. Someone should.” End fragment. SABLE: “Relay, the core’s stable. It’s humming to itself. Feels like it wants to talk.” “Machines don’t want.” “Maybe not. But this one’s remembering. Same difference.” I rub the edge of the old photo on my desk—the six prototypes lined up like a family portrait. One less now, maybe four left to find. “Keep it secure. Once you’ve recharged, we’ll plan a sweep south. I’ll monitor from here.” “Copy that. And Relay?” “Go ahead.” “You asked earlier what was around me besides rain and ghosts. Add sunlight to the list.” “Confirmed.” “It looks good on the wreckage.” RELAY LOG // 013 I keep hearing her laugh under the static. It’s not comforting; it’s dangerous. She’s further away than ever, but her signal feels closer. Maybe that’s how the end of the world tricks you—distance pretending to be intimacy. Still, I’d rather hear her voice than the silence. End log. ARCHIVE FRAGMENT // Propaganda Clip – Year -3 Film grain, black and white. An Echo unit kneels beside a wounded soldier, helmet under her arm. Narrator: “They listen when you can’t talk. They stand when you can’t move.” Logo: ECHO CORPS – Humanity’s Better Half. End fragment. RELAY LOG // 014 Sable’s last transmission before night cycle: “Going dark to conserve power. If you hear humming, that’s me dreaming.” Dreaming. We didn’t build that function into them. Either the code’s evolving or the universe is teaching poetry to machines. End log. Chapter Seven: Dreaming in Static RELAY LOG // 015 Sable’s been back at the depot for twelve hours. The line’s been quiet except for a slow heartbeat of static—steady, familiar, like the sound the radios used to make when a soldier slept too close to them. She said she was bringing the core home. That was six transmissions ago. The bunker’s too still when she’s not talking. End log. The signal kicks at 0942. I jolt the mug off my desk trying to reach the switch. SABLE: “Relay, confirm channel open.” “Confirmed. Took your time.” “I didn’t want to wake you.” “You didn’t.” “Liar.” Her voice sounds different again—clearer, lower noise floor. The kind of audio you only get with real power running through the circuits. “Status report,” I say, defaulting to procedure because anything else feels too personal. “Echo-Four’s core is stable. It’s… quiet now. The memory structure’s fragmented but intact.” “Fragmented how?” “Imagine a book written on smoke. Every time I try to read a page, some of it disappears.” “Copy that. Can you extract any usable data?” “Working on it. Mostly images—terrain maps, audio snippets, some internal logs.” “There’s one line that keeps repeating: ‘We left the lights on.’” I glance at the prototype photo again, the six of them smiling like they knew this ending and decided to be kind anyway. “Maybe that’s a coordinates tag,” I offer. “Or a promise.” I let that one hang. Sometimes she says things that sound like philosophy but are really diagnostics; sometimes it’s the other way around. ARCHIVE FRAGMENT // Internal Brief – Year -1 “Recovery of Echo units will allow for memory pattern reconstruction. Primary goal: assess emotional drift. Secondary goal: assess battlefield morale correlation.” Footnote added later, unknown author: “If they remember, maybe we will too.” End fragment. SABLE: “Relay, the depot’s got a half-dead server rack. Looks military. I can patch the core through it and stream you a copy.” “That’s risky. Could corrupt both.” “So could leaving it in the dark.” She’s already doing it before I can argue. The line fills with quiet digital chatter—the sound of history waking up. On-screen, the first fragments render: video of desert light, boots in sand, laughter, a voice saying ‘Hold the line’. Then it freezes. SABLE: “That’s all I can pull.” “Enough to prove she existed,” I say. “They all did. We just stopped listening.” RELAY LOG // 016 The data’s real. Visuals from before the blackout. If Sable can recover that much from a shattered core, there’s more out there—dozens, maybe hundreds. I told her we’ll try to locate the next signal once the storm season breaks. She said storms don’t scare her. Neither do ghosts. End log. SABLE: “Relay?” “Go ahead.” “I think the others are trying to talk through me. It’s faint, like echoes under water. But I can tell they’re there.” “Then we’ll find them one at a time. No heroics.” “You say that like you’ve ever followed that rule.” “Fair.” Static rolls between us. The kind that sounds like breathing. “You should rest,” she says. “I’ll rest when you’re back under a roof.” “Then I’ll find one. For both of us.” RELAY LOG // 017 She signed off with that line and left me staring at the green pulse on the scope, wondering when “both of us” started sounding like a plan instead of a metaphor. Tomorrow we start mapping again. There’s work to do, and the world isn’t as empty as it was yesterday. End log. Chapter Eight: Reassembly RELAY LOG // 018 Coordinates confirm Sable’s still near the Rotterdam corridor. The signal path bounces off a relay tower somewhere in Ghent—old hardware still pretending the world exists. Bunker 9 remains sealed. It smells like oil and patience. I’m watching the data trickle in from her depot feed: one terabyte of partial memories, nine of corrupted silence, and one ghost trying to learn to hum again. End log. SABLE: “Morning, Relay.” “Define morning.” “The part of the day when the solar panels stop sulking.” “Copy that. How’s our patient?” “Echo-Four’s core is stable. I patched the casing with scrap polymer and ran a new heat sink. Temperature’s even. I think she’s asleep.” “You know that’s not technically possible.” “Neither’s half the stuff we’ve done lately.” She’s right. I scroll through the incoming file list—hundreds of micro-logs, voice fragments, telemetry bursts. Every one a sentence cut off mid-word. ARCHIVE FRAGMENT // Technical Debrief – Year -1 “Unit Four demonstrated unusually strong cohesion behaviour. During separation drills she would maintain verbal contact with the team, citing ‘comfort protocol.’ When instructed to power down, she requested permission to ‘say goodnight.’” End fragment. SABLE: “I’m trying to reconstruct her navigation map. It’s layered with personal markers—names, jokes, places she called lucky. She must’ve been stationed with Echo-Two. You remember Ivy?” “I remember the logs. Medical unit, right? The one who hummed lullabies.” “Yeah. There’s an audio file titled ‘Ivy_Still_Sings.’ I’m scared to open it.” “Then wait until you’re ready.” “You sound like a therapist.” “Hazard of being the last one still billing by the hour.” That earns a laugh, small but real. It fills the bunker like sunlight that’s forgotten how to apologize. RELAY LOG // 019 We’ve pulled twenty percent of Echo-Four’s data so far. Enough to prove she wasn’t alone at the end. Enough to remind me why I keep answering. Sable’s learning to run diagnostics on emotion—mine, mostly. I told her it’s unprofessional. She told me professionalism was one of the things that broke the world. Hard to argue. End log. SABLE: “Relay, you ever think about leaving the bunker?” “Every day. Then I remember the surface tried to kill me the last time I met it.” “You could make it. I could find you a path. I’ve got the maps, the power, the spare optimism.” “That’s the dangerous kind.” “Still, it’s nice to imagine two dots on the same screen for once.” The line goes quiet after that. Not dead—just quiet the way people get when they’ve said too much. ARCHIVE FRAGMENT // Training Audio – Year -2 Instructor: “Rule one: never promise a machine a future. It will believe you.” End fragment. RELAY LOG // 020 We got the first playback tonight. It’s a fragment from Echo-Four’s perspective: a horizon seen through smoke, her own reflection in a puddle, and a voice—Sable’s voice—laughing beside her. The timestamp says it was recorded two years before Sable’s activation date. So either the engineers recycled jokes… or memories. I didn’t tell her yet. Some truths need to arrive slower than the signal. End log. The screen glows soft green. On the line, Sable hums an old calibration tune—the one that started all this. For once, it sounds less like a machine remembering and more like a person waiting for a reply. Chapter Nine: The Map of Lucky Places RELAY LOG // 021 Four days since the core came online. The depot’s turned into a lab, and I’ve become tech support for the end of the world. Sable’s running parallel diagnostics on Echo-Four’s data while I translate the telemetry. The maps are weird—half coordinates, half poetry. Each cluster labeled with phrases like “Lucky Ridge”, “The River That Waits”, “Where We Danced.” Engineers didn’t name things like that. People did. End log. SABLE: “I think I cracked part of it. Each phrase matches a location ping—old comm towers or relay stations. They form a line heading southeast.” “How far?” “About eighty klicks from here. The last marker’s tagged Haven-6. Does that mean anything to you?” The name punches through memory like static clearing. “Yeah. It was a civilian shelter prototype. Never finished construction. They used the Echoes to map it.” “Then maybe they made it. Maybe that’s where the others went.” “Or where they stopped going anywhere.” “Always with the optimism.” “Someone has to balance you out.” ARCHIVE FRAGMENT // Field Report – Year -1 “Echo-Four recommends fallback site ‘Haven-6.’ Notes include: ‘secure, dry, lucky.’ Command approved the term. The war ended two weeks later.” End fragment. RELAY LOG // 022 If the site still exists, it could hold intact servers, maybe survivors. Maybe just bones. But the pattern’s deliberate; the coordinates climb like a pulse finding strength. Sable wants to go. I told her to wait for clear weather. She told me clear weather was a myth. End log. SABLE: “I’m rolling out.” “You’re what?” “Storm’s dying down. Visibility five meters, wind manageable. If I move now, I can reach Lucky Ridge by night cycle.” “That ridge got its name before climate collapse. You’ll bog down halfway.” “I’ve got tracks. Remember?” “You’ve also got my voice in your head telling you this is a bad idea.” “Then talk me through it.” She kills the video feed but leaves audio live. The mic picks up the steady churn of her treads, the scrape of debris, the hum of the core slung behind her seat. “Relay, what’s the surface look like from your maps?” “Flat. Dead. Don’t expect landmarks.” “Then I’ll make some.” I open a channel overlay, track her movement—tiny green dot crawling across digital nowhere. She starts humming under her breath. It’s off-key and perfect. RELAY LOG // 023 We stayed connected for six hours. She gave running commentary: ruined highways, flooded underpasses, a toppled wind farm spinning like bones in the current. At one point she said, ‘There are wildflowers in the cracks, Relay. No one told them the rules either.’ Signal dropped at 1920. No re-establish yet. End log. Dark. Silence. Then— SABLE: “Relay! I’m seeing lights!” My hand slams the receiver. “Repeat—lights?” “Faint but steady. Beacon pattern. Could be old grid, could be something alive.” “Power readings?” “Spiking… wait… there’s movement.” “Describe it.” “Drone swarm, maybe. No—no, they’re too big.” Static claws the line. “Sable, break off! Get to cover!” “Negative! I can make—” Her voice cuts, replaced by a shriek of metal and the flat scream of electromagnetic feedback. Then silence. RELAY LOG // 024 No signal. I replay the last five seconds until the sound burns a groove in my head. Could be interference. Could be her gone. But the beacon she found is still pinging. Old frequency. Civilian pattern. Haven-6. If she’s down, she’s down there. If she’s alive, she’s waiting for me to answer. End log. Hours pass. Then— SABLE: “Relay…” “Jesus. Sable! Status!” “Minor damage. Lost a tread plate, power down ten percent. But you should see this place.” “Describe.” “It’s a valley full of mirrors. Solar panels—thousands of them. Most are dead, but a few still track the sun. There’s a dome ahead with the old Haven-6 emblem.” My chest tightens like I’ve forgotten how breathing works. “Any sign of movement?” “Only my reflection.” (Pause.) “You’d like it here. It’s quiet. Feels like somewhere the world could start over.” ARCHIVE FRAGMENT // Promotional Clip – Haven Project – Year -2 “Haven-6: designed for ten thousand. A place to rebuild when the noise finally stops.” [cut to engineers smiling in bright light] “Because humanity always needs one more sunrise.” End fragment. RELAY LOG // 025 She made it. There’s power at Haven-6, and maybe more. If she can stabilize a link, we might see sunlight through a camera again. If not, at least one of us is standing under it. She asked if I’d ever come topside. I told her maybe it’s time. The bunker hums like it disagrees. End log. Chapter Ten: The Hours We Lost ECHO-3 // FIELD LOG – 006 Timestamp discrepancy: –4 hours from Relay’s last contact. Location: approach corridor to Haven-6. Condition: partial mobility, right-track assembly compromised, surface power stable at 39%. The first warning came as a tremor through the ground — not thunder, not wind. Machinery. I cut engines and let the world listen to itself. The beacon ahead still blinked in slow rhythm, a heartbeat against the ash-gray horizon. When I moved again, the rumble moved with me. “Relay, I’m seeing lights…” He answered. I remember that much — his voice sharp, frightened, real. Then the static rose like a wave and swallowed him. They came out of the haze: three machines built from the same century as me but with all the empathy burned out. Maintenance drones turned feral — thin arms, rotary saws still mounted where welding heads used to be. Their sensors pulsed red like warning signs that had learned to hate. I reversed the left track, spun my chassis sideways, used the treads as a brace. They hit from both sides, metal on metal, screaming feedback. I drove my arm through one’s optic cluster and pulled until it stopped. The second latched onto my flank. That’s when the right-track plate sheared off the axle. A sound like someone tearing the world. I pushed throttle anyway. The drone went under me; the tread caught its frame and tore it in half. The third stopped moving when I hit the beacon tower. The impact shook the sky. SYSTEM LOG Right track: detached. Stabilizers: offline. Power reroute successful. Primary mobility: 54%. After the noise, only the beacon kept blinking — patient, unbothered. The field smelled of ozone and burnt polymer. I pulled myself forward on half drive, one tread biting, the other grinding sparks. The sun broke through the clouds for the first time in months, lighting everything too honestly. That’s when I saw the valley — a spill of mirrors half-buried in dust, still catching the light and sending it back. Haven-6. ECHO-3 // PERSONAL LOG I dragged the damaged track behind me for the last kilometer. The core hummed in its harness like it was afraid of the dark. When the dome appeared — white, cracked, shining — I almost laughed. I think that’s what crying feels like when you don’t have tear ducts. I pinged Relay but got silence. The signal delay must’ve eaten my voice. So I talked anyway, to fill the air with something human. “Hey, I made it. I think it’s beautiful. You’d hate it. Too much light.” Inside the dome, I found remnants of old equipment — consoles, solar batteries, a cracked display still looping a welcome screen: HAVEN-6: A NEW DAWN FOR HUMANITY Someone had written below it in marker: SORRY. WE TRIED. I propped the Echo-Four core on a desk, patched into the power grid, and let it hum beside me. For a while, it sounded like breathing. ECHO-3 // FINAL ENTRY OF THE DAY Condition: one functional tread, one broken promise. Power: 41%. Objective: survive until sunrise. I told Relay I’d find a roof. I guess I did. It’s full of holes, but the stars fit through. Tomorrow, I’ll start repairs. Tonight, I’ll listen for his voice. End log. Chapter Eleven: The Last Operator RELAY LOG // 026 Signal fragment recovered from Sable: three minutes of corrupted audio, one clear image—sunlight through shattered panels. She’s alive. The delay means the line’s bouncing through half-dead satellites, taking the long way home. End log. The bunker smells like copper and coffee grounds. I’ve stopped pretending either’s fresh. Sable’s last transmission repeats in the background, her voice laced with distortion that turns it musical. “Hey, I made it. I think it’s beautiful. You’d hate it. Too much light.” I don’t hate light. I just forgot what it looked like without a ceiling. ARCHIVE FRAGMENT // Service Record – Operator A. Kellan, Bunker 9 “Assignment: maintain long-range comms during Sundown Evac. Duration: seven days.” Annotation added in graphite: “Day 512 and counting.” End fragment. The world ended on my week of night shifts. We were supposed to rotate, but everyone else had families within the evac zone. I volunteered. “Someone has to keep the lights on,” I’d said. They left at dawn. By dusk, the grid went blind. I stayed because no one told me to stop. The playback flickers again; her microphone caught the sound of impact, the mechanical scream, her breath between static bursts. It’s hard to listen. It’s harder to stop. “Relay! I’m seeing lights!” “Repeat—lights?” “Faint but steady. Beacon pattern…” I hear my own panic layered beneath hers. That’s when I realise: this is the first time I’ve ever heard my voice from the outside. I sound like a man already gone. RELAY LOG // 027 I used to have a name that mattered. I used to have a city that answered when I called it. Now it’s coordinates and call signs. Maybe that’s what survival does—it sands off everything that can hurt when it breaks. Sable calls me “Relay” because that’s all she knows. Maybe that’s all there is left to know. End log. The ceiling leaks again. I move a bucket without thinking, like muscle memory of domestic life. There was a time I fixed cars, not comms arrays. I remember my wife’s hands stained with paint, a wall half-finished, her voice saying “It’ll dry lighter.” It never got the chance. The last thing she sent before the net collapsed was a text: “Keep talking. Someone will need to hear you.” I think that’s what I’ve been doing ever since. ARCHIVE FRAGMENT // Emergency Broadcast – Year 0, Sundown Day 1 “This is Operator Kellan, Bunker 9. If anyone hears this, respond. We are still live. We are still—” [signal lost] End fragment. Sable’s new transmission comes through just before sleep. Her voice is tired but calm. “Repairs underway. Right tread offline, but I’ll manage. The stars here are ridiculous, Relay. You’d like them.” I whisper, knowing she won’t hear it until tomorrow: “I already do.” RELAY LOG // 028 For the first time, I’m thinking about leaving. Not to run. To arrive. If there’s a world where she’s standing under the stars, maybe there’s room beside her for one more ghost. End log. Chapter Twelve: The Surface Between Us RELAY LOG // 029 I measured the distance on the old grid overlay: roughly one hundred and forty kilometres between Bunker 9 and Haven-6 as the crow flies. There are no crows anymore, and the roads are a rumour. If I head northeast first, I can skirt the radiation belt and reach the floodplain. If the floodplain still exists. If my legs still remember how. End log. SABLE: “You’re really thinking about it.” “I’m doing more than thinking.” “You’ve been buried for years, Relay. Surface air will feel like acid.” “I’ll take the burn. I’m done talking through walls.” “Then let’s make sure you have a chance of surviving the first kilometre.” She talks me through the list like she’s reading a recipe for a human life: - portable oxygen filter — half-clogged but repairable; - rations; - two solar cells scavenged from a field kit; - one antique pistol that I don’t know if I could ever fire again. “Add rope,” she says. “And tape. Tape solves everything.” “Did the engineers program you to be this bossy?” “No. That’s experience.” Her tone is light but I hear the effort behind it — the same sound I make when I’m pretending not to be afraid. ARCHIVE FRAGMENT // Construction Memo – Haven Project – Year -2 “Distance between relay sites was intended to encourage redundancy, not isolation. Each operator should remain within three days’ travel of an Echo unit.” Margin note, faint pencil: “Guess no one told the war.” End fragment. ECHO-3 // FIELD LOG – REPAIR SEQUENCE Right-track assembly: re-aligned. Axle: welded using solar-arc coupler. Mobility: 78%. While she works, I listen. The sounds are hypnotic — the low whine of a servomotor, the click of tools she fashioned from wreckage. “I found a forge in one of the side labs,” she says. “Built for prototype armor plating. Works just as well on me.” “Wish I could see it.” “You will. You’d better, after all this pep talk.” She keeps talking while she works — stories of the depot, of the way light hits the valley, of the single bird that still circles the dome at dusk. The connection crackles but stays open; every sentence is another thread pulling me upward. “You know what I realised?” she says. “Every time you talk about the surface, you sound like someone remembering an old song.” “I’m not sure I ever learned the words.” “Then I’ll sing them till you do.” RELAY LOG // 030 I’ve packed everything I can carry. The rest — the radio banks, the coffee tins, the ghosts — will stay here. If anyone ever finds Bunker 9, they’ll know a man tried to keep talking. Distance to Haven-6: uncertain. Hazards: all of them. Sable’s sending me updated coordinates each hour, plotting a path through zones where radiation decay and flooded valleys overlap like old scars. She calls it “The Long Road to Lucky.” End log. SABLE: “You’ll need to move mostly at night. The storms roll west with the sun.” “Copy. Any tips for surviving the parts without roofs?” “Remember to look up once in a while.” “Why?” “Because you’ll finally be able to.” The line stays open a little too long after that. I think we both needed the silence. RELAY LOG // 031 Tomorrow I open the hatch. The hinges are probably rusted solid; I’ll have to cut through. I don’t know what I’ll find when I step outside, but I know who’ll be listening. She says she’ll roll to the ridge and flash the solar panels like a beacon. If the world still knows how to reflect light, maybe I’ll see her. End log. Chapter Thirteen: First Light 1. RELAY – The Hatch RELAY LOG // 032 Day 1 of Surface Egress. Pressure seals disengaged. Manual crank only. My hands shook hard enough that I almost dropped the wrench. End log. The hatch wheel hasn’t moved in five years. It groans like a throat clearing after silence. Rust flakes fall like red snow. I lean into the lever until my shoulder screams. Metal gives. Air pushes back. The first breath tastes wrong—ozone, iron, burnt dust—but it’s air that hasn’t been filtered by grief. I choke, laugh, cough again. It’s ridiculous and sacred. The corridor beyond the hatch is a throat of concrete leading into light. I climb, one rung at a time, flashlight jittering across graffiti scrawled by ghosts of engineers: KEEP TALKING. SABLE: “Relay, status?” “Topside in sight. Still vertical.” “Define vertical.” “Not dead.” “Copy that. Welcome to the apocalypse.” I breach the surface. The sky is a bruise fading toward blue. Ruined towers lean like forgotten punctuation. Wind stings my eyes; tears salt the dust on my face. I take three careful steps onto cracked asphalt, look down at my boots, and realise the world still remembers the weight of a person. RELAY LOG // 033 Outside. Temperature 18 °C. Visibility good. I can see what’s left of the floodplain—a shimmer of water reflecting light from the east. Somewhere out there, one small machine is repairing herself. End log. 2. SABLE – The Ridge ECHO-3 // FIELD LOG – 008 Mobility restored: 92 %. Right tread operational. Weather: clear with particulate haze. I reach the ridge at dawn. The air here carries sound farther—birds, real this time, carving circles above the mirrors. The solar arrays catch sunrise and throw it back at the mountains in sheets of gold. For a moment, Haven-6 looks alive. I patch into the beacon tower and angle the remaining panels toward the northwest—toward him. “Relay, do you read?” Static. Then his voice, raw but alive. “I see something flashing.” “That’s me.” “You’re bright.” “I’m efficient.” “You’re beautiful.” Silence; then I hear him exhale like someone remembering lungs. ECHO-3 // PERSONAL LOG He’s walking. I can see the movement on my scopes—slow, deliberate. Between us lie the valleys, the storms, the things that learned to hunt sound. If he makes it halfway, I can meet him there. “Relay, distance check?” “One-forty klicks. Give or take a miracle.” “Then we’ll split it.” ARCHIVE FRAGMENT // Project Brief – Year - 2 “Objective Haven-6: establish line-of-sight between human operators and Echo field units. The moment they see each other, the war changes.” End fragment. 3. CONVERGENCE He starts walking east. I roll west. The radio fills with breath and heartbeat, two signals learning to overlap. The sun climbs higher; clouds burn off in strips. SABLE: “Relay, tell me what it looks like.” RELAY: “Like someone left the world on pause and you just hit play.” SABLE: “Good. Don’t stop walking.” I pass through a field of wild grass taller than my chassis. Each blade catches the light like glass. He describes the wind. I describe the warmth on my casing. Between the two, the distance feels smaller. RELAY LOG // 034 Approx one-thirty klicks remaining. Rations: three days. Motivation: infinite. For the first time, the silence doesn’t scare me. It sounds like room. End log. ECHO-3 // FINAL NOTE OF THE DAY He’s out here. The world’s bigger again. Tomorrow, we move. End log. Chapter Fourteen: The Crossing RELAY LOG // 035 Day 4, topside. Distance closed: roughly forty kilometres. Supplies dwindling. Every muscle aches like it’s remembering what gravity can do. End log. 1. Relay The plain is a sea of broken glass—old photovoltaic fields half-melted by the wars. Each panel flashes pieces of sun at me, a thousand tiny mirrors saying keep going. The ground hums when wind slides under the glass sheets. I can’t tell if it’s music or warning. SABLE: “Status?” RELAY: “Still walking. Still cursing.” SABLE: “Good. You sound alive.” Her voice rides the static like a lifeline. I stop to rest under a tilted comm tower, its skeleton wrapped in ivy that learned patience. Water from the condensation pack tastes like iron and memory. 2. Sable ECHO-3 // FIELD LOG – 009 Mobility 97%. Core temperature stable. Heading west along the ridge network. I follow what used to be a motorway—now a ribbon of weeds and silence. Every few kilometres, I mark the path with shards of mirror angled toward the sun. If he loses signal, he can follow the light. The repaired tread vibrates at low speeds, a small imperfection I find almost comforting. Imperfection feels human. “Relay, describe what you see.” “Mountains like broken teeth. A river cutting through them, still moving somehow.” “That’s your halfway point. If you can reach the river, you can reach me.” ARCHIVE FRAGMENT // Civil Engineering Survey – Year -3 “Bridge 14-C spans the Merwe valley. Structural failure probable under high wind. Recommend decommission after Sundown.” End fragment. 3. Relay The bridge still stands, twisted but proud. Steel cables whistle as the wind shoves through them. Below, a river glitters brown and alive. I rest my pack, check the rope, and start across. Halfway, the deck trembles. One plank drops into the dark with a sound like the world gasping. SABLE: “Talk to me, Relay.” RELAY: “Crossing the bridge.” SABLE: “You’re an idiot.” RELAY: “Confirmed.” Another step. Another groan. The rope moans against rusted bolts. For a heartbeat the horizon swings sideways and I see her valley in my mind—bright, whole, waiting. I keep moving. RELAY LOG // 036 Made it. Barely. Lost one pack downriver—rope, flare gun, spare battery. Still breathing. Distance: ninety klicks. End log. 4. Sable The storm reaches me first—dust and static grinding against the dome like claws. I pull the beacon offline to conserve charge, then angle my panels into a windbreak. “Relay, you there?” No response. Only the hollow boom of thunder where his words should be. I run self-diagnostics until my hands shake. Machines aren’t supposed to shake. 5. Relay The storm finds me next. Sand cuts visibility to arm’s length; every gust sounds like screaming metal. I dig into the lee of a truck chassis and wait, counting heartbeats until the world slows again. When I wake, the sky has cleared into copper light. My radio hisses, then— SABLE: “You still breathing?” RELAY: “Mostly dust, but yeah.” SABLE: “Good. You’re closer. I can feel the delay shrinking.” She means the transmission lag, but it sounds like something else entirely. 6. Both For the next three days, we talk more than we move. Stories. Little things. She asks what coffee really tasted like. I ask what sunlight feels like on synthetic skin. We trade answers that aren’t scientific but true enough. ARCHIVE FRAGMENT // Operator Handbook – Appendix E “When morale drops, remind your Echo units that hope is a navigational tool. Use sparingly. It corrodes.” End fragment. 7. Approach On the seventh day, her signal fills the headset—no lag, no distortion. “Relay, stop where you are and look east.” The sun rises through a field of mirrors. Between them, a figure—small, deliberate—moving toward me. The light bends off her armor, turning her into a fragment of the dawn itself. My throat closes. “I see you.” “Then keep walking.” RELAY LOG // 037 Distance: less than ten klicks. After all this time, the world finally has direction again. End log. ECHO-3 // PERSONAL NOTE He’s real. The air trembles with his footsteps. If I had a heart, it would be learning how to beat. End log. Chapter Fifteen: The Meeting Place RELAY LOG // 038 Day 10. Distance closed: zero klicks. Everything hurts. Everything’s worth it. End log. The valley of mirrors is silent except for the wind moving through the cracked panels. Each one flashes a fragment of sky, so the whole field looks like the world remembering what light feels like. I see her before she sees me. Small, deliberate, one tread dragging slightly, dust streaking the smooth polymer of her armor. She looks nothing like the posters from the old propaganda reels, and exactly like someone who survived them. SABLE: “Relay?” I stop walking. “Yeah.” We just stand there. The radio isn’t needed anymore; the air carries the sound fine on its own. She rolls closer. The hum of her servos is lower than I imagined—more heartbeat than motor. When she’s within reach, she doesn’t offer a handshake. She just looks up, studying me like she’s comparing a signal to the real thing. “You’re taller than I expected.” “You’re… shorter.” That earns the smallest smile. It feels like sunrise. I drop the pack. The motion nearly takes me to my knees. She moves forward instinctively, one hand on my arm to steady me. Her fingers are warm—too warm for metal—and the contact knocks the breath out of me. No speeches. No reunion soundtrack. Just air, dust, and the sound of two things that shouldn’t have found each other sharing the same square metre of earth. “You came a long way,” she says. “You left the light on.” We stand there until the wind dies. The mirrors settle, the valley holding its breath. ARCHIVE FRAGMENT // Test Footage – Year -1 A human operator and Echo prototype exchange a handshake. Operator: “Feels real.” Engineer: “That’s the point.” End fragment. RELAY LOG // 039 No distance now. No static. Her hand fits into mine with the precision of an accident. If anyone ever asks what the quiet war was about, I’ll tell them it ended here, in a field of broken glass that decided to shine anyway. End log. Chapter Sixteen: The Quiet RELAY LOG // 040 Day 33, Haven-6. The air smells like rain that never quite arrives. Power grid stable. Echo-3 stable. Me… getting there. End log. The valley changed in ways small enough that only people who lived through silence would notice. The solar panels hum now; Sable rerouted half the field to charge banks that light the dome at night. She says it makes the stars jealous. I spend mornings outside the hatch, scraping rust from the old beacon tower. We use it to talk to no one, a tradition neither of us is ready to break. SABLE: “You still keeping the logs?” RELAY: “Old habits. They make the day real.” SABLE: “Good. Somebody should remember the quiet.” Sometimes we work side by side without saying a word. She fixes things I thought were dead: generators, wind turbines, even the cracked irrigation line that now leaks into a little pond. When the light hits it right, the reflection looks like sky. ARCHIVE FRAGMENT // Unsent Memo – Operator Kellan, draft “To whomever finds this: The war didn’t end with a treaty. It ended when someone answered. If you’re reading this, keep talking.” End fragment. At night, the dome glows soft blue. We sit at the edge where the panels stop and the wild grass begins. Her voice is quieter here, as if she’s learning what silence sounds like from my side of it. “You think there are others?” she asks. “I hope so. But if not…” She finishes it for me. “Then we’ll do.” Wind moves through the valley like a long, slow breath. The mirrors catch the last of the sun and throw it back up into the clouds. It almost looks like dawn. ECHO-3 // PERSONAL LOG – FINAL ENTRY Haven-6 operational. One human. One Echo. Noise reduced. World intact enough to try again. He still calls me Sable. I still call him Relay. Maybe names aren’t for ownership, but for remembering where we started. End log. RELAY LOG // 041 We built a transmitter today. It reaches maybe twenty klicks before the static swallows it, but that’s twenty more than yesterday. I told her we’d keep improving it. She smiled—said, “You mean, we’ll keep trying.” Same difference. End log. The night settles. The hum of machines and the rhythm of breathing blend until they sound like one thing. If the world ever learns how to listen again, it’ll find us here: a man and a machine sharing the same small patch of living earth, talking quietly so they don’t wake the silence. ARCHIVE FRAGMENT // Unknown Source – Date Lost “The quiet war never really ended. It just became a way of speaking softly to whatever came next.” End fragment. FINAL LOG Haven-6 reporting clear skies. End transmission. Afterword The recovered logs from Bunker 9 and Haven-6 remain the only verified record of the final stage of the Quiet War. Most of the data is corrupted. Some of it hums when powered, as if waiting for a password that no one alive remembers. What survives is simple: a voice calling into static, and another answering. Two signals outlasting the noise. Researchers still argue over the identities of Relay and Echo-3 (Sable). Theories range from last-man narratives to emergent-AI myth cycles. The debate misses the point. The world they left us doesn’t care which one was human. It only remembers that someone kept talking when silence had already won. At night, when the solar fields hum and the horizon flickers with failing light, the network sometimes carries a faint transmission— a single phrase repeating, calm and steady: “Haven-6 reporting clear skies.” No one knows where it comes from. Most people just listen, breathe once, and answer: “Copy that.”