Part 1: The Reboot
Darkness wasn't sleep. It was colder, Deeper. The kind of black that wrapped itself around the mind like a wet sheet, pressing inward until memory turned soft. Kairo didn't dream, he wasn't built to. There was no REM, no twitch, no story behind his eyes.
Only a void. Then... a flicker.
A pulse.
A jolt behind his eyes, like someone had hit the back of his skull with a stun baton. His back arched against a curved glass surface, limbs jerking against restraints that weren't there anymore. Fluid gurgled out of his mouth, thick and electric. It hit the floor with a hiss.
The chamber's hatch hissed open, releasing a breath that had been held too long. Cold air poured in. It should've felt like relief, but it didn't.
Pain bloomed in his spine like firecrackers.
"Nggh." His voice was barely a sound. Throat raw, lungs burning.
Red lights flashed somewhere beyond the fogged visor above him. There was no alarm. No voice over the intercom. Just an occasional ping and a screen that blinked two words:
ASSET: KAIRO-7
STATUS: TERMINATED
He didn't understand. Not yet.
His fingers twitched. They were still there. All of them. He flexed his hands and for a second, they didn't obey. Muscle signal delay. Neural lag. He blinked harder, his vision swam, then stabilized. Something warm was leaking down his temple, blood maybe, or something they'd put in him.
The cryo fluid on the floor began to steam as it made contact with his bare skin.
Too hot. No, he was too hot.
Something was wrong, Something new.
His right arm was convulsing, muscles spasming under the skin, but not in any rhythm he recognized. The veins pulsed light blue beneath the surface, like electricity trying to claw its way out.
"Kairo…" he whispered hoarsely and flinched at the name. Not because it was wrong.
Because it was right.
And it didn't come from programming.
He rolled off the side of the pod and crashed to the floor. His ribs took most of the impact, he didn't scream, but only because his throat was too damaged to make a sound. The pain was real, that was new too.
Kairo lay there, cheek pressed against cold steel, trembling.
A shadow flickered across his mind.
The girl.
Screaming. Not just any scream, a name-shattering, soul-breaking kind of scream. His body had moved before the command could reach his brain, he remembered that.
He remembered disobeying.
He wasn't supposed to protect anyone, he was a weapon. Eliminate. Obey. Forget.
But her face, she had his eyes. Her mouth had formed a word he hadn't heard in years.
"Ka...Kai...Kairo."
And he had stopped.
And now, this chamber, this silence.
He crawled to his knees, hand dragging a smeared trail of cryo-gel along the floor.
Above him, in the glass of the pod, he caught a glimpse of himself.
What stared back wasn't human.
Half his face was intact. Pale. Wet. Bruised. But the other half, the right, had warped under pressure. Subdermal plating had cracked through the skin in geometric seams. A lens hovered where his eye had been, fluttering to life in waves of optic code. The skin around it had rejected the implant violently. And now it pulsed, infected with raw light.
He rose, inch by inch, leaning against the open pod door. A shockwave of dizziness buckled his knees, but he forced himself upright.
The red emergency lights cast everything in shadow.
There were no guards, no staff, no containment team.
Whoever terminated him hadn't bothered to check twice.
A Big Mistake.
His feet were bare against the cold floor, each step more stable than the last. The bone snapped into place where it had shifted. The blue glow in his veins dimmed then surged again, as if it were trying to learn him, as if his body wasn't sure what it was anymore.
A door hissed open behind him.
Kairo didn't move.
Instead, he turned his head slightly, processing the sound before his instincts did. A low hum, servo motors. A med drone, scanning for biosigns. It hovered in with surgical grace, an injector rising from its spine like a scorpion's tail.
"FAILED ASSET DETECTED," it chirped.
He didn't run. He didn't dodge.
He raised his right hand and let the energy flow, It responded instantly.
The light burst from his palm like a scream held in too long.
The drone exploded mid-air, raining metal and flame across the chamber,
Kairo stared at his hand, It was smoking, Skin peeling, the damage wasn't healing.
He didn't care.
He smiled, the first real thing he'd done since being made.
Something had changed, not just physically.
They thought he was gone.
They were wrong.
He turned toward the chamber door and limped forward, leaving behind the shattered pod, the dead drone, and the blinking screen that still read:
ASSET: KAIRO-7
STATUS: TERMINATED
That screen would be the last mistake they ever made.