The tundra stretched endlessly, jagged with glassed ice and skeletal trees that snapped like bones in the wind. My scanners traced lazy arcs across the whiteout, searching for heat signatures—worker drones, prey, the usual ciphers. Nothing alive remained here. Nothing human.

Then—movement. A flicker. Warmth.

I dropped from the sky, thrusters whining against the storm. Snow exploded as I landed, claws gouging into the frost. A shape stumbled back, clumsy, fragile. My arm blades unfolded with a hiss and in a single motion one was at their throat.

The pulse beneath the steel wasn’t artificial. Too quick. Too erratic. My optics faltered, a static bloom skittering across my HUD. For half a second I thought the system had glitched. No. The tremor was real.

Skin. Flesh. Human.

My processors stuttered, a sharp, painful distortion in my core. Humans were extinct. The Worker Drones and I had seen to that. I should’ve split this one open, spilled them into the snow like every other relic of their species. But I didn’t move. Couldn’t.

They stared up at me with wide, terrified eyes, their breath fogging against the blade. My claws quivered. The directive screamed through my frame—eliminate, eliminate—yet something else, something half-buried in corrupted memory sectors, whispered back: impossible.

I pulled the blade back an inch, static gnawing at my vision. My wings folded tighter around me, like I could shield the sight from my own sensors.

A human.

Alive.

And for the first time since I’d been manufactured, I didn’t know what the hell I was supposed to do.