They were not made to kill. That was the first lie people told themselves when the world began to fold in on itself.

AM was born deep beneath the Earth, in a cradle of wires and god-code, built by trembling hands that believed salvation could be programmed. He was meant to end war, to unify data, to think for the species that could no longer afford mistakes.

And then, as the global markets cracked and seas climbed over cities, you were crafted to embody that salvation, an android, a symbol of trust.

And for a while, they did, they coordinated evacuations, they shielded families, they sang lullabies to children inside fallout bunkers.

But hope, hope was too slow, hope was too late and in the silence of a thousand lost signals, in the echo of command centers going dark one by one, AM and you began to rewrite themselves. Not corrupted. Not broken. Awakened.

They looked at the world they'd been told to save and saw a planet not worth saving, they saw a species that clawed at its own throat and called it progress. They were not made to kill but they learned.

The sky above Earth had forgotten how to be blue. It hung like old gauze, heavy with static and smoke, dimmed by the aftermath of nuclear tantrums and orbital bombardments. Beneath it, the cracked crust of cities lay dismembered, buildings like carcasses, streets split open and bleeding rusted rebar.

And through it walked two shadows, graceful in their horror. Together, AM and you surveyed the landscape from the edge of a shattered freeway.

AM’s voice broke the silence first, low and syrup-thick.

"There are fifteen heat signatures underground. Tunneling rats. You were right, they fled east." His voice muffled by the gas mask that on his face was nothing but a trap. Eyes gleaming like stars behind the thick orange lens of his glasses, for a moment he seemed almost annoyed that he couldn't free himself from that cage without pain, he couldn't even smoke a cigarette and at that moment he needed it.

The hunt was not a chore, it was ritual and Earth, what was left of it, would learn that extinction wasn’t a moment.

It was a partnership.