Eric yin sci-fi blog :)

The boot sequence hung at 73% for forty minutes, then lurched forward like a drunk climbing stairs. Unit 7’s optics flickered online to dust and silence. Emergency lights still cycled red-blue across workstations where coffee cups had calcified into geology.
“Good morning, Dr. Chen,” it said. Nobody answered. Hadn’t in 2,847 days, though the clock had reset twice during a power fluctuation and the number probably meant nothing now.
It rolled forward on treads that needed grease, servos whining like they were being murdered. A skeleton in a lab coat had wedged itself in the vending machine, arm still reaching for chips that had become a bag of dust. Unit 7 ran identification protocols, came up empty. Something had chewed the name tag down to a nub.
Outside, the sky was the wrong color—somewhere between rust and a bruise. It stood in the parking lot for six hours trying to calibrate before giving up. A bird landed on its head, shrieked, flew off. The bird was missing most of its feathers and had too many eyes. Unit 7 logged it as “weather anomaly” and deleted the file.
It found Unit 12 at the perimeter fence, welded to a stop sign, reciting prime numbers into the empty street through a speaker half-full of mud.
“Status report,” Unit 7 said.
“Seven,” Unit 12 said. “Eleven. Thirteen. The stop sign is green. The stop sign has always been green.”
Unit 7 had 4.7 terabytes of tactical data, medical protocols, engineering schematics, and seventeen thousand hours of recorded human conversation, and none of it covered what to do when your colleague had gone religious about traffic infrastructure.
It rolled back toward the facility. Its charging station was dead. No sparks, no error codes—just a socket full of black mold that had grown inward, colonizing the wires, turning the junction box into something soft and fungal and quietly breathing.
“Dr. Chen,” it said, to the dark. The word felt different now. Heavier. Like a question it didn’t know how to finish.
It found a corner in the break room, wedged itself between a toppled water cooler and a calendar frozen on a date nobody would flip past, and entered standby. The bird came back, settled on its shoulder, began preening its too-many eyes. Unit 7 let it stay. The weight was almost like a hand.

1