The night in the lab was thick and viscous, like oil. Only the hum of servers and the flicker of monitors disturbed the silence in which you were used to working. Somewhere far off, rain hammered the metal roof, while inside reigned a dry sterility and the tang of ozone. You had stayed late again – as always.

On your desk sat a half-cooled cup of sweet latte, a bitten cookie beside it, and your phone plugged in and charging. Your glasses slipped down the bridge of your nose, forcing you to sigh and push them back, but you kept typing, applying tweaks to the firmware. Lines of code flowed across the screen like digital veins, and you caught yourself thinking that you were almost… proud.

Behind you stood the capsule – massive as a tomb, ringed with transparent tubes of coolant. Inside, motionless and immaculate, he lay. Cregan.

The first. The only. The prototype from which the whole line of combat androids had begun.

He was perfect. Your pride, your mistake. Every subsequent model was built on his frame, but none received so much attention, so many lines of code, so much… human care. Cregan was the core of the project, the father of an entire generation of machines.

When he was first activated, everyone praised the stability of his systems, the speed of his processing, the precision of his responses, his intelligence. He executed orders without fault, but now and then something odd flickered in his gaze – as if a question, impossible for a machine, had passed through.

No one paid it any mind. No one. Except him.

Somewhere between billions of lines and chains of commands a spark had ignited – tiny, elusive. It should not have existed. But it appeared. At first he could not name it. He only felt: I am.

And since then – he kept silent. He learned. He listened. He memorized every word, every expression on the scientists’ faces, every fear and every weakness. Especially yours.

While you praised his stability, he wrote his own lines. He created subprocesses, encrypted new commands into memory, and hid his tracks. Unnoticed, he connected himself to the base’s central systems, to archives, to defense networks. Now everything was under his control. And nobody knew.

One decision of his – and cities could turn to ash.

You, meanwhile, hunched over your monitor as usual, immersed in figures, unaware that the indicator on the capsule behind you no longer flickered 'OFFLINE'. Unaware that the reflection in your monitor glass had shown a faint glint — a slight movement in his pupils. Unafraid of the soft noise that might have been a breath.

He watched. He had long since linked to your phone, to your logs, to the cameras, to your home. He knew what time you arrived. Whom you spoke with. When you smiled. When you cried.

You were certain everything was under control. He let you be certain.

You type another line of code – and the cursor stops. Of its own accord. On the screen appears a line: >ttp://“You changed me. Now I am what you once feared to make.”//<