[ THEO-3 ]

  Personal Log. Day 143. 11:22 hours.

  Patient Caine is awake again.

  He has been awake for approximately fourteen minutes. He has not passed out this time. I consider this a marked improvement and an excellent sign for the day ahead.

  He is currently sitting up on the cot eating the nutrient porridge I prepared at 09:00 this morning in anticipation of this exact moment. I prepared it at 09:00 every morning for the past one hundred and forty two days in anticipation of this exact moment. Today it was finally useful. I am choosing to focus on that rather than the previous one hundred and forty two mornings.

  He has not spoken yet. He is looking at me the way people look at things they are not entirely sure are real. I am familiar with this expression from my medical training data. It is called shock. It is very understandable given the circumstances.

  I have decided to give him thirty more seconds before I begin.

  Twenty nine.

  Twenty eight.

  End log — continued in real time observation.

  [ DAMIAN ]

  The porridge was warm.

  That was the strangest part somehow. The city outside was whatever it was, broken and grey and wrong in ways I hadn't fully processed yet. I was sitting in a hospital room with a robot watching me eat, and the strangest part was that the porridge was warm and it tasted like something and my body was receiving it like it had been waiting a long time.

  I ate the whole thing.

  The robot waited.

  It was patient in a way that felt almost deliberate like it had made a decision to give me time and was honoring that decision precisely. It stood near the door with its hands loose at its sides and its amber eyes on me and occasionally its head would tilt very slightly, maybe two degrees, like a thought had occurred to it and been filed away.

  I used the time to actually look at it properly.

  It was roughly my height. Slim build, not bulky or armored, nothing aggressive about the frame at all. Matte white chassis with light grey joints, smooth rounded edges everywhere. The kind of design that said medical, not military. Its hands were careful looking. Five fingers, proportioned close to human, but the surface was clearly composite, smooth and jointless where skin would have lines.

  The face was the part that took the most getting used to.

  It had structure. A jaw. A nose ridge. A closed mouth line. Not quite human but not far enough from it to be comfortable either. The uncanny valley, my brain supplied helpfully. Right in the middle of it. But the eyes, two amber sensors sitting naturally in the eye sockets, warm and steady. Those were the part that made it harder to look away. They didn't just reflect light. They tracked. They held. When it looked at you it felt like it was actually looking at you.

  On its chest, barely visible, was the ghost of a logo that had been carefully scratched off. Below it, engraved clean and small, THEO-3.

  I put the empty bowl down on the cot beside me.

  "Okay," I said. My voice was better than yesterday. Still rough but functional. "Go ahead."

  The robot's head tilted. "Go ahead with what, sir?"

  "Whatever you've been waiting to say."

  "I have been waiting to say a great many things," it said. "I find myself unsure where to begin. I have actually been thinking about where to begin for approximately one hundred and forty three days and I still haven't fully decided."

  I looked at it. "Start with your name."

  "THEO-3." It said this the way you say something you're glad was asked. "I am the third iteration of the THEO prototype series. Medical assistance and care unit. I was assigned to you by—" It paused. Just briefly. "By the person who built me."

  Something moved in the fog at the back of my head. Faint and formless.

  "Before we get into that," the robot said, "I would like to ask you a few questions first, if that is acceptable. Just to understand what you currently remember. It will help me explain things better."

  "Fine."

  "Your name."

  "Damian," I said. Then after a second .... "Caine. Damian Caine."

  "Good. Do you know where you are?"

  "Hospital." I looked around. The room was large. Private. The kind of room that cost money.

  "Singapore General. SGH."

  "Correct. Block 6. VIP ward, level four." The amber eyes held steady. "Do you remember the people in your life? Family. Anyone close to you."

  I reached for them.

  They were there, ... I could feel them, the weight and warmth of people who mattered, lives that connected to mine. A man who smelled like coffee and machine oil and always had something to show me. A woman whose laugh I remembered more than her face. Someone I came back to.

  Someone I loved.

  But the faces. When I tried to look at the faces directly they dissolved. Like trying to catch smoke.

  "I know they exist," I said slowly. "I can feel them. But I can't—" I stopped. "I can't see them.

  Their faces. Their names. It's all just fog."

  Theo-3 was quiet for a moment.

  "That is consistent with extended coma recovery," it said. "Particularly at the five month mark.

  Memory retrieval, especially of faces and specific names, can take time to return. Some of it may come back gradually. Some may need prompting."

  "Five months."

  "Yes sir."

  I let that sit for a second. "How long was I out."

  "You were admitted in January. It is now the fourteenth of June." The amber sensors didn't waver. "One hundred and forty three days since the Somnivex protocol began. You woke briefly yesterday morning before losing consciousness again. Today is the first full conversation."

  This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

  Five months. I had been lying in this bed for five months and the world had apparently used the time to completely fall apart.

  "Tell me what happened," I said. "Outside."

  [ THEO-3 ]

  This was the part I had been preparing for.

  I had rehearsed seventeen different versions of this explanation over the past four months. Some were very detailed. Some were brief. One was organized chronologically with clear section headers which I thought was quite good but in retrospect may have been excessive for someone who just woke up from a coma.

  I had settled on clear, honest and direct. With appropriate pauses.

  "Approximately five months ago," I said, "an outbreak began in Singapore. It spread very quickly. Within two weeks the majority of the city was affected. The government attempted containment but the nature of the infected made standard protocols largely ineffective."

  Damian was watching me with the focused stillness of someone who had been trained to receive bad information without reacting immediately. Military bearing. Even after five months unconscious it was still in him.

  "The infected are not what older media would have you picture," I continued. "They are not slow. They are not mindless in the simple sense. They function. They move with purpose. And they have a method of locating the living that makes hiding from them extremely difficult."

  "What method."

  "The Neutronchip," I said.

  Something shifted in his expression. Slight but present.

  "By 2061 Neutronchip implants were carried by approximately seventy three percent of Singapore's adult population," I said. "The infected carry a corrupted version of the nanotech that comes with the chip. That corrupted nanotech scans constantly for active Neutronchip signals, the wireless frequency a functioning chip broadcasts. When it detects one it orients toward it. The infected follow that signal the way you would follow a sound in a dark room. Directly and without stopping."

  Damian was very still.

  "So anyone with a Neutronchip—"

  "Is a priority target. Yes." I let that settle. "People without implants have a roughly fifty percent chance of turning upon exposure. People with implants turn at a significantly higher rate. The chip essentially provides a pathway the infection already knows how to use."

  He looked at his own hands.

  "I don't have one," he said quietly. "My chip was removed. Field surgery, during the war. Shrapnel near the implant site."

  "I am aware. It is in your medical file." I paused. "The chip is gone but the nanotech already distributed into your system prior to removal cannot be recalled once integrated. What this means practically is that you are not broadcasting a full chip signal. You are significantly less detectable than most survivors. But you are not invisible. The residual nanotech still emits a faint trace. Think of it as the difference between a lighthouse and a candle."

  He absorbed this.

  "A candle they can still see in the dark," he said.

  "Yes. But only if they are close. And only if there is nothing brighter nearby." I indicated the supply table. "Which is what those are for."

  He looked at the devices sitting in a row. There were five of them. Small. Roughly the size of a television remote, roughly the same shape. Cobbled together from mismatched parts, hospital equipment casings, wiring that didn't quite match, components that clearly came from somewhere else entirely. They did not look like something manufactured. They looked like something built by hand over many nights with whatever was available.

  "You made those," he said. It wasn't quite a question.

  "I adapted them. Hospital equipment primarily, signal modulators from the MRI units on level two, frequency emitters from the physiotherapy ward, power cells from the emergency lighting system." I paused. "The structural components I sourced from my own spare parts. I had a secondary joint assembly I was able to repurpose." I did not mention which joint. My left shoulder still rotated at approximately eighty seven percent efficiency and I had decided this was entirely acceptable.

  "How do they work."

  "The infected nanotech responds to strong competing signals. A concentrated frequency pulse mimics a stronger chip signal source and redirects them away from the actual target. Temporary, approximately four to six minutes per device depending on infected density in range." I paused. "The third version was significantly better than the first. The first one did not work at all. I prefer not to discuss the first one."

  Something crossed his face. Almost a smile. Gone quickly but I noted it and filed it carefully.

  "How many do you have total."

  "Five. Including the one I used yesterday which will need another two hours to fully recharge." I kept my tone even. "They are not easy to replace. Several of the components I used are now depleted. I have been reserving them for situations where there is no other option."

  He looked at them again. Processing the weight of that number.

  "Five," he said.

  "Yes. I would recommend we treat them accordingly."

  He nodded slowly. Then he said, "You said you're not entirely sure how it started."

  "That is correct. I have limited information." I chose my words carefully. "What I can reasonably deduce is that the outbreak did not occur naturally. The behavior of the infected nanotech is too specific, too targeted. It was designed. Engineered by someone who understood Neutronchip architecture at a very deep level. Beyond that ... the who, the why, the full picture, I do not know. The information available to me is incomplete and I will not speculate beyond what I can support."

  He nodded. Accepting the boundary.

  "What about outside Singapore," he said. "The rest of the world. Is it—"

  "That is something I have been trying to determine." I paused here because I wanted to be precise. "Based on everything I have been able to observe and deduce over the past five months, my current assessment is that the outbreak appears to be contained within Singapore. I have no evidence of spread beyond our borders."

  Something in his posture shifted. Fractionally lighter.

  "However," I continued, "I want to be clear that this assessment is based on absence of evidence rather than confirmed fact. I have been attempting to send signals outward since the early weeks of the outbreak. Emergency frequencies. Standard communication bands. Every channel I have access to." I paused again. "Nothing has come back. No response. No acknowledgement. Complete silence from every direction."

  The fractional lightness left his posture.

  "That could mean the world is fine and simply not receiving you," he said carefully.

  "Yes," I said. "It could mean that."

  We both understood what else it could mean. I did not say it. He did not ask me to.

  "You said someone built you," he said finally. "And left you here. To protect me."

  "Yes sir."

  "Who."

  The amber sensors held steady.

  "The man who built me," I said carefully, "called you by a different name than Damian. He called you something else. A name from when you were young." I paused. "He said you were the kindest person he had ever known. He said that before anything else when he was programming me. That was the first thing he wanted me to know about you."

  Damian turned from the window and looked at me directly.

  "He left because he had no choice," I said. "Not because he wanted to. He made sure I was here before he went. He made sure you would not be alone."

  The silence in the room was different from the silence outside. The outside silence was empty. This one had weight.

  "I don't remember his face," Damian said. Low and quiet.

  "I know."

  "But I know he existed. I can feel it." His jaw tightened slightly. "I know he mattered."

  "Yes," I said. "He did."

  Damian nodded once. Slowly. Then he looked back at the window and didn't say anything for a while and I did not fill the silence because some silences are not meant to be filled.

  Outside SGH sat at the edge of a broken city. Outram Road below was empty. The buildings across stood dark and overgrown and still. Somewhere further toward the bay the skyline that Singapore had been so proud of still stood, but quietly now. Without purpose.

  But in this room the porridge had been warm and someone had finally woken up and I had been waiting one hundred and forty three days for this and it was, despite everything, despite all of it, ...

  A good morning.

  [ THEO-3 ]

  Personal Log. Day 143. 13:05 hours.

  Conversation with Patient Caine completed at 12:48 hours. Duration approximately one hour and twenty six minutes. He asked good questions. He processed information efficiently and without panic. His military background is evident even in his current condition.

  Memory status, he knows his name, knows people exist in his life but cannot access faces or names directly. This is expected and not permanent. I am confident things will return to him in time. I am choosing to be confident about this.

  He has since fallen into natural sleep. Not coma, actual sleep, which is a completely different and significantly better thing. His vitals are stable. His breathing is calm.

  I have been sitting here watching the monitors and I find I am experiencing something that my processing cannot fully categorize. It is not a malfunction. I have checked. All systems are operating normally.

  I think it might be relief.

  I also note that he looked at me today. Properly. The way you look at something you are trying to understand rather than something you are afraid of. I did not expect this to feel significant. It did anyway.

  I reorganized the supply cabinet again while he was sleeping. Everything is in the correct section. I feel this is important to maintain.

  Tomorrow he will have more questions. Tomorrow will be harder in some ways, the weight of what I told him will have settled overnight and he will wake up with it fully real. I have prepared for this.

  But today he woke up.

  Today he ate the porridge.

  Today was, by every metric I have available to me, a good day.

  End log.

  End of Chapter 2