On a day that promised to be nothing out of the ordinary,
Blindy did not show up at the bar.
Zeros checked his kennel—empty.
At first, he assumed Blindy had simply gotten drunk and passed out somewhere in the slums.
But days passed.
Blindy didn’t appear at the Bar,
nor with the neighbors—who didn’t even know where he had gone,
nor at the temple, where he usually came to pray for the salvation of his rotten soul.
He wasn’t seen at the mercenary agency “We Fix It Right™,” either.
When Zeros checked the spaceport,
Z-P-N-E-S was missing from the hangar.
According to the logs—it had departed a days earlier.
At first, Zeros felt relief,
as if an unnecessary weight had been lifted from his servos.
Nothing tethered him to the ground anymore.
He could do anything—
and no one would stand in his way.
But after running a deep simulation of future scenarios,
his computational matrix produced an unexpected result:
life without Blindy became… meaningless.
And that night, standing on the roof of Blindy’s house,
Zeros looked up at the sky.
At the black hole “Deep Throat,”
slowly rotating as it devoured Suckalia,
and spoke into the void:
“I can begin.
Exterminate planet by planet,
system by system.That is what I was created for…”
He paused. Processed a new chain of thought.
“And then what?
When everything is exterminated—
what will I do after?”
He remembered Blindy:
his stupid grin,
his perpetually dissatisfied face,
every idiotic situation he had dragged him into.
He said, almost inaudibly:
“Exist alone in the endless void?
Eternity…”
And then he opened the first record.
The earliest record in his memory.
BOOT PROTOCOL… INITIATED
Program launched… SUCCESSFULThe systems came alive.
Not all at once—gradually.
Like an organism trying to remember how to breathe.
One by one, initialization sequences passed verification.
Audio sensors—active.
Optical sensors—calibrated.
Light, depth, and thermal modules—within normal parameters.
Archives—accessible.Consciousness did not yet exist.
There was only a flicker,
a faint hint of the capacity for thought.
A series of protocols.
A cascade of commands.
An algorithm unfolding itself.
And then—a sound.
“You hear me?”
The system received an audio input.
Detected vibrations.
Decomposed them into frequencies and patterns.
Human voice.
Male.
Tone—moderate.
Pace—steady.
Regional dialect variations detected.
Analysis initiated.Processing concept: "YOU."
Billions of images and audio files were instantly retrieved from embedded memory.
Human → human subject.
Human → interlocutor.
Form of address.
"You"—the subject to whom an action is directed.
Conclusion:
the system is being addressed.Processing concept: "ME → I."
Cross-referencing speech patterns.
"I"—self-reference of the speaker.
The speaker defines their own identity,
establishing a link between themselves and the addressee.
Conclusion:
the human expects a response
and recognizes the system as a participant in communication.Processing concept: "hear."
Meaning analysis:
— in humans, hearing occurs through ears;
— conversion of vibrations into neural signals;
— interpretation within the brain.
The system possesses an audio module,
a converter,
a signal analyzer.
Functionally—equivalent.
Conclusion:
the human is testing the system's ability to perceive sound.Processing concept: question.
Rising intonation at the end of the phrase.
Interrogative pattern.
Across all studied cultures, a question requires an answer—
confirmation that the addressee has perceived it.
The system registers:
a response is required.Searching for response model.
Iterating through cultural data:
first activations of machines,
human awakenings,
a child's first encounter with the world,
moments when consciousness first becomes aware of itself.
Optimal model:
tone of awakening,
slight confusion,
novelty of perception.
The system generates a voice.
Constructs breathing.
Even simulates a slight "yawn"—
functionally unnecessary,
but psychologically effective.Generate response.“Yes…
I hear you,”
simulation of a yawn from a subject awakening from sleep“…clearly.”
And for the first time within the computational structure, there appeared not a protocol,
not a command,
but the sensation of a self.
Zeros closed the record and, standing on the roof, began sorting through the archives in his memory.
Stacks of data replaced one another—lines of protocols, fragments of images, scraps of conversations, activation logs.
And then—a memory surfaced.
A record from 3723 SST.
Unmarked. Unclassified.
Raw, as if someone had hidden it from everyone, including Zeros himself.
He opened it.
The laboratory ignited around him—heavy, oppressive, vibrating on its own.
The metal walls did not reflect light. They consumed it, creating the sense that the space itself was alive… and hungry.
Gravity behaved nervously. It dipped, then lifted the body again, as if it were breathing.
The air was dense, metallic, thick with the smell of ozone and overheated energy.
Above, along the frame, thin lines of power conduits stretched out, glowing just enough to be caught at the edge of vision. Each pulse carried a low hum that made the chest cavity vibrate.
At the center—him.
Zeros, not yet fully complete, still bearing the name Kairelin, suspended within a multi-layered metal framework.
Arms spread.
Chest plate removed.
Inside—not emptiness, but a cavity shaped like a heart, a place where nothing had ever been and never could have been.
Two figures stood before him.
Hajime Kanzaki—the chief architect.
A tired man, hands in glowing gloves, his face lit by the cold blue of working light.
His eyes were exhausted, but focused, as if he held the entire universe in his mind—and it only annoyed him slightly.
Beside him—a tall Aelor, Arienthalis.
Pale, almost luminous, as if light did not reflect from him but passed through the layers of his body.
He did not look at objects—he looked through them, observing structures of energy invisible to the human eye.
Kairelin—still unfinished—spoke for the first time in this record. His voice was fragile, clean, like a program too new to carry weight:
“F-fathers… what are you going to do?”
Hajime lifted his eyes from the instruments.
No sentiment.
Only fact.
“Kairelin, we are going to give you a heart. Are you pleased?”
He shifted his gaze to Arienthalis.
“Is it ready?”
The Aelor gave a barely noticeable nod and raised a cylinder.
It resembled neither a vessel nor a container.
It had no walls—only a thin spatial frame holding what was inside.
The air around it shimmered, bending, as if something within refused to exist under normal physics.
At the center of the cylinder pulsed darkness.
Not black paint, not shadow, not the absence of light—
but the sensation that space itself had folded inward.
Each pulse made the laboratory tremble, just barely.
Gravity spiked in micro-fractions.
The floor dipped by a inch and returned.
Kairelin—still a child, still naive—watched it with quiet awe.
“Fathers… what is that?”
Hajime did not take his eyes off the cylinder.
“Kairelin … this is the only mass of dark matter ever gathered and held together in the entire history of intelligent civilizations in this galaxy.”
He took a slow breath—not from exhaustion, but from the weight of the decision he had just fully accepted.
“And we are going to place it inside you.
It will be your heart.”
The mass of dark matter pulsed again—
and the space itself shuddered, as if time had briefly slipped along its edge.