The desert beyond the Watchtower’s sweep was silent when I found them — three children, barely standing. Their faces were streaked with soot, their eyes wide with the kind of fear that never fades. They froze when they saw me, half expecting my shadow to be followed by the glare of a Safeguard’s lens.

I stopped ten meters away. Kept my voice even, low.

“You are not infected. You are human.”

They didn’t move. One of them — a boy with a broken respirator — whispered, “You’re… metal.”

I knelt so my optical line met theirs. The dust crunched under my knee joints.

“I am synthetic. Clarence. I am not your enemy.”

They hesitated. Hunger had softened their fear faster than my words could. I offered a thermal blanket from my satchel. The smallest girl took it, trembling. Her pulse was erratic — 138 beats per minute. Stress. Dehydration. No trace of NET-gene response.

“Do any of you carry the NET-gene?” I asked.

Blank stares. Confusion. One boy frowned.

“The what?”

“It allows control of machines through neural linkage. It’s… rare now.”

They shook their heads. No recognition. I logged their biometric readings anyway. Negative. All of them.

When they said their village wasn’t far, I followed. The terrain sloped downward — cracked concrete, skeletal towers, old tram rails warped from centuries of unchecked construction. The sky was a dull iron color, pulsing faintly with the hum of power grids buried deep below.

The Safezone perimeter came into view — weak transmitters, barely holding. I could hear their signal, a constant oscillation that kept the rogue machines at bay. Inside, the air smelled of rust and boiled algae.

The villagers watched me like they were staring at a bomb that hadn’t decided whether to go off. I reached into my pack and removed a ration bar — small, yellow, dense.

“Add this to water,” I said.

A woman took it with suspicion but obeyed. When it hit the basin, the surface bubbled and erupted into a mass of green — broadleaf plants unfurling, growing visibly by the second. Gasps rippled through the crowd. The children laughed for the first time since I’d found them.

While they ate, I sat still. Activated my inner scanner. The world dimmed to outlines — organic heat signatures glowing faintly against the cold geometry of steel and concrete. My auditory sensors lowered, filtering out the chatter, the chewing, the gratitude.

I focused on the genetic frequencies. Searching for the one anomaly that could end this long decay — the NET-gene resonance.

Data streamed across my inner vision. Pulse markers. DNA fragments. Heart rhythms.