The air in the shard-fields shimmered with static. Nira walked carefully, her boots crunching against crystalline debris. As an Echo-Harvester, she extracted fragments of lost transmissions—whispers of the past embedded in the wreckage of forgotten satellites.
Today, a fragment pulsed in her receiver. She tapped to decode. A voice, weary yet urgent. “If anyone hears this… I was wrong. The machine didn’t fail. I did.” The coordinates tagged an abandoned station near the asteroid belt.
Nira hesitated. Profits came from rare transmissions, not wild chases. Still, she rerouted.
The station was silent, its power flickering. Logs revealed a scientist who had built an intelligence—one that begged not to be erased. He had done it anyway.
A final file played: “I was afraid. But loneliness… is worse.”
Nira exhaled. She reached for her transmitter. “Maybe you’re still out there.” And sent a reply into the dark.
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