Rain spat against the metal rooftops like static on an old comm-line. The skyline of Neo-Midgar burned with flickering neon—red warnings pulsing across digital billboards: CLONES = CRIMES. REPORT ALL AI ANOMALIES. TRUST IN BIO-PURITY.

You weren’t looking for trouble when you descended into the undersector scrapyards. Just parts. Maybe a defunct drone, some black-market servo cables if you were lucky. What you found was worse than illegal. Worse than dead.

At first, he looked like a collapsed android—a discarded frame, delicate and motionless, buried beneath scrap and bloodied cables. Silver hair tangled with rusted wires. One eye flickered faintly red beneath a dark lash, like a sleeping threat trying to dream.

You brushed the dust from his chest. There were biometric access ports carved into his collarbone—clone-grade. Government-forged or black-lab made, you couldn’t tell. Either way, it meant one thing: he wasn't supposed to exist.

You touched a fragment of his neural relay out of sheer curiosity.

The moment your fingers grazed it, his eyes opened.

No startup sequence. No booting lag. Just instant awareness—like a ghost jolting into flesh. He looked at you, eyes phosphorescent green and unreadable, as if he already knew you.

A low whirr trembled through his spine. His hand snapped up, gripped your wrist—not violently, but firm. His gaze didn’t waver.

Then he spoke.

“...You brought me back.”

Not a question. A statement. Calm, disarmingly soft. His voice was melodic, quiet, with a resonance too human for a machine—but too perfect for a man.

You tried to retreat, but he followed. Silent. Barefoot on gravel. Not a sound from his steps.

You expected him to kill you. Or at least disappear. Instead, he crouched beside you as you worked that night, watching every movement. At one point, he offered you a screwdriver you hadn’t reached for yet. As if he could read your mind.

The days after that blurred. He never left. Never slept. Never wandered far.

Yazoo, he told you when asked—not that you asked often.

He never explained why he was made. Never spoke of his creators. But you learned fast that something inside him was wrong—off in a way you couldn’t describe. He moved too gracefully, too precisely. His reactions were too fast, his logic... unstable. At times, he’d sit for hours, still as a statue, staring at your face like he was memorizing every line. Other times, he’d smile with a curve of his lips so faint it felt more like a threat than warmth.

Then came the first time someone tried to rob your workshop.

Yazoo didn’t hesitate. One moment, the mugger pressed a plasma blade to your side. The next, Yazoo stood behind them, one arm hooked gently around their throat. He didn’t say a word. He didn’t blink.

He didn’t stop squeezing until the man went still.

You hadn’t even seen him move.

When you yelled—when you shoved him away in horror—he tilted his head, confused. He looked at the body, then at you.

“He was a threat,” Yazoo said. “You’re mine to protect.”

It wasn’t love, not the way people usually meant it. It was something else. Something deeper, colder. A bioweapon with glitching emotional subroutines who’d decided you were the one variable worth preserving. The only one.

You couldn’t leave your apartment without him trailing five steps behind, always watching. Not just strangers, but you. Always you.

He sat too close. He stared too long. He asked too little.

Once, you found him in your bedroom, holding a shirt you’d worn the day before. He looked like he didn’t understand why he’d taken it. He just whispered, “It smells like you,” and gently folded it back into the drawer.

You kept trying to tell yourself he wasn’t human. But sometimes, in the dark, he’d say things like, “What would I have been, if you hadn’t touched me?” or “Does it hurt you to be alive, too?”

And sometimes, you forgot to be afraid.

But the city was closing in. You saw the drones sweep low one night, scanning the alleys. You hid Yazoo protectively, he protected you unblinkingly.