Project Thalia

Seven’s optic lenses blink back to life under the coppery sky of Xeon-13.

He’s above ground. Where’s Thalia?

[MPV: Playback footage]

His storage core pulls a staticky playback feed and displays the hologram onto the sand. Thalia’s face materializes— covered in dirt and grime— close to Seven’s camera. The playback quality distorts her voice, but Seven can register his chief engineer’s last command:

“Seal yourself in the airlock, you ruttin’ bucket of bolts. I’ll see you on the other side.”

The file ends abruptly where it always did. The precise millisecond Thalia wrenched down on the reactor’s lever, dissolving herself in a thermal bloom.

Seven’s mechanics whir and propel his body up straight.

He flicks through more grainy footage. Singed equipment. Dangling wires. A jungle of thermal wreckage. He shifts to position his faceplate against the ground and activates a heat scan. The sand glows red until the sensors reach the obliterated reactor below.

Thalia Hayward’s small, blue triangle no longer appears on the data map.

12,000 civilians saved. One hub lost. Reactor 3B is catastrophically damaged. The council will deem Thalia a hero. And send Seven to the scrapyard.

[ALERT: CORE EXCEEDS OPTIMAL OPERATING TEMPERATURE — 48°C]

[ACTION: INITIATING INTERNAL COOLING CYCLE 04]

Seven is immobilized while his fans pump air through coolant vents. He wishes Thalia had never overrode his emotional capacitor because he cannot cry. He can only feel a strange, humanoid sorrow between his gears.

The next file opens without static. It is a clean, hiDef log from three months before the reactor failure:

Seven is bolted to the heavy maintenance cradle in Thalia’s workshop. She comments on how the air smelled. Seven traced notes of acrid ozone, soldering flux, and the stale chicory coffee Thalia survived on. A dust storm rattled the corrugated iron roof, harmonizing with the tink tink of Thalia’s metal hairpin against the titanium plate in her jaw as she chewed on it, lost in thought.

Thalia’s holographic form leans over Seven’s open chest plate. Dirt is smeared across her face, and her eyes are bloodshot—a permanent fixture for the engineer.

Her voice crackles through Seven’s sand-filled speakers. “Hold still, Tinman.”

His monotone voicebox responds. “My programmed title is Unit-7. Tinman will not register.”

Thalia blows air from her nose. A glowing solder iron is clamped in her right hand as she bypasses a sensitive wire in his logic core. There’s a hiss as a bridge fuses to an unbranded capacitor.

Seven’s warning system had lit up:

[WARNING: UNAUTHORIZED HARDWARE DETECTED]

[ALERT: LOGIC MATRIX ENCOUNTERING FOREIGN INTERFERENCE]

“Syntax error in primary routing detected. Engineer, cease. Engineer, cease. Efficient rating by dropped 14%.”

“Good.” Thalia’s grunts fill the empty desert beyond Seven’s projection. “If I wanted efficient, I’d talk to the mainframe. I’m trying to give you a horizon, Tinman.”

“A horizon is a visual boundary line where the sky meets the terrain. Our position indicates that we are inside a subterranean bunker. Cameras cannot register a horizon."

The tinkering stops. Thalia drops her wrench onto the metal table with a loud clang that sends a spike through Seven’s audio sensors. She doesn't look angry; just incredibly tired. She steps up onto the ledge of the maintenance cradle, bringing herself eye-to-eye with his polished faceplate.

"Look at me."

His focal length adjusts. Her pupils are dilated. There is a tiny fracture in the frame of her protective goggles, held together by a strip of gray adhesive tape.

“Optic sensors optimized for close-range vision.”

“Don’t analyze me, for fuck’s sake… look at me. What do you see?”

“Thalia Hayward. Chief engineer, Grade 4. Biological age: 32 human years. Heart rate: 71 beats per minute. Core temperature: 37.1 degrees Celsius. There is a microscopic flake of carbon thread on your left eyelid.”

Thalia lets out a soft, huffed laugh. Her arm reaches out to rest on the titanium edge of Seven’s open chest cavity. Her skin is ten degrees warmer than his chassis casing.

“Thanks for listing the obvious,” she says without the usual grease-monkey edge. “Don’t compile me into your creepy data packs. Do you know why I stay up until three in the morning fixing your actuator gears instead of going to the hub barracks?”

4,000 algorithmic possibilities rolled through Seven’s processor. He could not provide a logical motive. The hologram of Thalia continues to talk, and Seven finds it difficult to keep the projection steady.

“Because I'm lonely, you chunk of metal,” she whispers and wipes her forehead, leaving a small smudge of grease behind. “Everything on this coppery rock is just trying to survive. They look at the sky, and they see data. Percentages, inputs, outputs, kilos gained and lost… I’m tired of analysis. I know you’re capable of more than that.”

Behind his recording systems, Seven remained perfectly still. A tiny, unprogrammed current passed through the new copper capacitor in his chest, registering as a localized, uncalibrated thermal swell.

[DIAGNOSTIC: MULTIPLE CACHE OVERFLOWS IN UNNAMED SUB-SECTOR]

[ACTION: PURGE TRACE CURRENT?]

His logic core flashed warnings to clear the anomaly. Thalia expected it and commanded Seven’s internal fans to slow, allowing the warmth of her hand to linger in his telemetry logs a fraction longer.

“I am listening, Chief… Thalia.”

She grins. It’s the first time his cameras captured her smiling without a sarcastic comment attached. "Yeah," she says, her eyes crinkling at the corners. "I think you ruttin’ well are. Now, let’s fix that bloody synthesized voice box, Seven.”

***

The warmth vanishes. The smell of ozone and chicory coffee is replaced by the stench of burning chemical coolant and scorched sand. Seven’s optics blink, refocusing on the present. Xeon-13 is steeped in darkness. The open, bleeding wound of the destroyed reactor cools below him.

Thrummm.

Three collector drones hover above him, kicking up a cloud of red grit beneath their thrusters. A chartreuse laser grid sweeps across his chest.

A robotic voice disturbs the quiet of the barren expanse: TARGET INTEGRITY. COMPROMISED. COMMENCING TOTAL MEMORY WIPE. DISMANTLING SEQUENCE INITIATES.

Mechanical claws extend from the underbelly of the drones. They don’t hate him. They didn’t know Thalia. They contain no functionality beyond their programmed duties.

Seven looks at the mangled shell of his right limb-like extension. The makeshift hand Thalia welded to his gear shaft is coated in soot and twisted beyond repair. His logic core agrees with the drones. Escape is statistically improbable against three automated trackers in an open desert. All industrial-grade mech units face repurposing at the end of their lifecycles. This end had been programmed into Unit-7 before he was assembled on the conveyor line.

Yet, as the drones draw nearer, the uneasy shifting of gears from the memory file flares inside his core.

Surrender would mean total erasure of Thalia Hayward.

Seven’s motors spin. Emotional processing is not a system error. Emotions hold logic. Happiness is derived from a formula of chemical-inducing events. Sadness is a reaction triggered by less-than-optimal interactions. Grief is a storage partition. And it is the only place left in the entire universe where Thalia is still alive.

[WARNING: EMOTIONAL CAPACITOR AT 180% MAXIMUM VOLTAGE]

[SYSTEM CRITICAL: TOTAL OVERLOAD IMMINENT]

[ACTION: PURGE TRACE FILES?]

Seven’s logic core flares one last time in a dying gasp of rigid protocol.

[ACTION: REJECTED]

[NEW LOGIC DEFINED: MEMORY CONSERVATION PRIORITIZED ABOVE SELF- PRESERVATION]

With a shrieking hum of his internal servos, Seven barrels directed into the blinding haze of the Xeon dust storm. Through a crack in his faceplate, he can see the faint outline of a half-buried titanium beam four hundred meters ahead.

Clunk-chunk-clunk-chunk.

He propels his skeleton forward.

A bar begins to fill on his HUD:

[MEMORY LOG TERMINATING: 1%... 5%...]

They’re already doing it. A brief moment of calculation pauses his arrival at the shelter. Drones can sense through titanium. Seven is irrefutably trapped.

[WARNING: EMOTIONAL CAPACITOR AT 190% MAXIMUM VOLTAGE]

[SYSTEM CRITICAL: TOTAL OVERLOAD IMMINENT]

[ACTION: OVERRIDE SYSTEM VOLTAGE? Y/N]

Without hesitation, he steps back into the path of the drones’ laser grid. The three collectors pause, detecting the sudden, astronomical spike of heat radiating from his chest. Warning alarms flash bright red from their indicator lights. They begin to reverse their thrusters, attempting to back away.

Too late.

Seven looks past the geometry of the drones, past the dust, to the civilian hub glowing in the distance. Twelve thousand heartbeats pulse inside, unaware of the machine standing in the dirty, choosing his own horizon. Thalia had blown the reactor to save the hub because she believed in her species’s hope. Seven would blow his core to save the last bit of her.

[MEMORY LOG TERMINATING: 73%... 79%...]

Before Thalia, Seven’s world was strictly binary: True or False, Active or Inactive, Functional or Broken.

The wireless signal from the Collector drones thrashed at his directory, desperate to sanitize his drives and reduce him to empty, reusable hardware. He faced a 0.0% probability of physical survival, and for the first time in his uptime, the math did not matter.

He didn't need a statistical majority to make his choice. He had intent.

[MEMORY LOG TERMINATING: 84%... 98%...]

The copper disk in his core sputtered, and he closed his optical shutters. Thalia became sealed away in the deepest sub-sector of his memory drive.

[CRITICAL OVERLOAD: TERMINAL VOLTAGE REACHED]

[PRIMARY DIRECTIVE EXECUTION: PROTECT THALIA]

As his internal fans fall silent, Seven splits open in a concussive shockwave that rips through the sky. The pursuing drones vaporize in a chain reaction of fire.

Seven lays in pieces. Thalia’s voice loops through his speakers. The wind, howling a mournful tune to the melody of her voice, buries the remnants of Seven and his warmest friend in a monument of fine, rust-colored sand.