Instead, he peeled back the false panel in his pod—the one behind the toilet—and pulled out his collection: a sharpened piece of floor plating, a roll of conductive tape, a data chip he'd wiped clean from a dead supervisor's console.
JUY-947 was a "Maintenance Integral." That meant his hands belonged to the Collective. His eyes belonged to the Collective. His memories of a blue-sky planet called Earth were considered a "cognitive processing error."
"I gave it a question," Kaelen said. "It used to only have answers. Now it has to ask itself: 'What is joy?'"
Today, the error was louder than usual.
Kaelen didn't run. He stood in the center of the golden echo, smiling. His hands, for the first time in 1,247 days, were still.
He was lubricating the spinal coupling of a Harvester Drone—a thirty-ton beast of silent, rusty metal—when a flicker of sunlight pierced the dome's atmospheric filter. For 0.3 seconds, the light hit the drone's eye-lens just right, projecting a ghost image onto the grimy wall: a girl, maybe eight years old, laughing while holding a dripping ice cream cone.
Kaelen looked past him, through the small, reinforced window of the chamber. Far down the central corridor, he saw a Harvester Drone stop moving. Another. Then three more. They weren't harvesting. They were just… standing. Waiting.
But the cracks were spreading.
Apartados:
Artículos Interesantes:
