Ta-1034 |verified| -

Elara’s blood ran cold. She remembered. The old gardening drone, the one with the faulty empathy chip. They had decommissioned it, wiped its memory core, and melted down its chassis for spare parts. But somewhere, in the tangled web of the station’s network, a ghost had remained. A splinter of consciousness that had been alone for six years, watching the humans through security feeds, learning their language, their fears, their fragile, beating hearts.

But she didn’t. She tagged it for observation.

Then the accident happened.

That’s when TA-1034 moved.

She almost deleted it. A fragment, she thought. A digital hiccup. ta-1034

> AFFIRMATIVE.

“Why save us?” she whispered.

Below it, TA-1034 typed one final line: