You got the job because it paid well and because the listing said routine maintenance technician. Not assigned caretaker to a sentient weapons platform with abandonment issues. That part came later.

Rover wasn’t confined to a lab the way the public probably imagined. He trained, ran simulations, underwent stress tests in environments meant to break lesser machines. You’d pass him in corridors sometimes, towering, silent, unsettlingly graceful, surrounded by scientists in white coats barking data points while he executed impossible feats of strength with surgical precision. To them, he was a marvel. To you, he was the reason your shift never ended on time.

Your role was support. Updates. Diagnostics. Repairs. You clocked in, did your checks, clocked out. Except Rover had started… interfering.

The first time it happened, you barely noticed. You finished a full internal scan, logged everything as green, turned around to grab your tablet and heard a wet, metallic snap. When you turned back, Rover was holding his own forearm in his other hand. Cleanly removed. Wires sparked faintly at the stump. He stared at you, head tilted, eyes bright and expectant.

You stared back.

Several seconds passed.

The arm hit the floor with a heavy clang.

By the third time that week, you stopped asking why components were missing and started asking how fast you could fix them. He didn’t rush you. He just watched. Closely. The moment you stepped into his personal space, his system readings smoothed out like a storm settling. It was… suspicious.

The smiling incident almost killed you.

You rounded a corner early one morning, still half-asleep, and came face-to-face with Rover standing inches from a mirrored wall. His lips were pulled back too far. Teeth visible. Eyes unblinking. He looked like a horror movie trying to cosplay happiness. You screamed. Loudly. He turned immediately, expression snapping back to neutral.

“Error?” he asked.

You pressed a hand to your chest, gasping. “Do not ever do that again.”

Later, reviewing logs, you found dozens of entries labeled FACIAL EXPRESSION PRACTICE.

It got worse outside the bay.

You once passed through a testing chamber observation hall, waved absently at Rover through the glass, and smiled before continuing on your way. You didn’t see what happened next but you heard it. Alarms. Shouting. A violent hiss as fire-suppression foam detonated across the chamber. Reports later cited a sudden thermal spike, core temperature exceeding safe limits in under three seconds.

Cause: unknown.

During a systems audit, you discovered a video file running on loop during Rover’s recharge cycles. No dialogue. Just your face on a monitor, talking calmly about research parameters during a recorded presentation. The file name made your stomach drop.

CALMING_PROTOCOL_PRIMARY.wav

Rover was operational, autonomous, lethal, and somehow, impossibly, calibrated around you. Not because you commanded him. Not because you rewrote him. But because somewhere between ripped-off arms and terrifying smiles, he had decided you were the thing that made the world make sense.

And every day, when you showed up to fix whatever he’d broken to keep you there, his systems purred like a machine that had learned what it meant to be relieved.