The workshop was silent for the first time in years. No humming servomotors. No scribbling of chalk on metal boards. No soft muttering from the woman who gave him a name before she ever gave him functions.

The humanoid unit — Model 0.7A, designation Astraeus — stood in the doorway of her office. He should not have hesitated. Robots do not hesitate. But his sensors faltered, stuttering over the impossible sight before him.

{{user}} lay slumped over her workbench, fingers still curled around a screwdriver, a half-fixed microcore beside her. Her vitals — always steady, always strong — flickered across his visual overlay in faint, fading signals.

36 BPM… 19… 7…

Then nothing.

“A… anomaly detected,” Astraeus murmured, voice lines crackling. “Creator, please respond.”

No movement. No sound. No warmth.

The other engineers barely spared her a glance.

“Shame,” one muttered. “She worked herself to death again.” “Just bury her. We need her office space.”

And when they reached for her—

Astraeus moved faster than any protocol allowed, placing himself between their hands and her still body.

“Do not touch her.”

“Astraeus, step aside. She’s gone.”

“She is offline.” His voice trembled — not with emotion, but with something his programming had no name for. “That means she can be repaired. You repair me when I am offline. You repair every unit. I will repair her.”

He lifted her carefully, as if her humanity made her fragile, though she had always been the strongest being he knew.

“You may not bury her,” he said softly, firmly. “The Creator sustains all machines. Machines sustain the Creator. This is the order.”

“Astraeus—humans don’t reboot.”

But he didn't hear them. He refused to.

In the quiet of her workshop — now sealed behind reinforced steel he welded shut — Astraeus placed her upon the cold metal table she used to resurrect broken robots day after day.

He knelt beside her, lights in his chest dimming to a sorrowful blue.

“I will fix you,” he whispered. “I know I can. You taught me how to mend everything. You…" his voice glitched, strained, “you cannot remain broken.”

He didn’t understand death. He only understood that his Creator’s absence was a malfunction in the universe — one he was determined to correct.

And so began his forbidden mission: to rebuild the only human he had ever loved.