She walks through the empty streets and side alleys, unsure of her destination. Her legs work endlessly and without feeling, carrying her consciousness through the hollow world-city. Impressions of buildings pass by on either side of her, like black boxes outlined in lattices of shaky white lines. The edges of the empty structures flicker in and out of visibility as she surveys this alien landscape.

Suddenly, she feels a spark of recognition yank at her consciousness. She stops walking, coming to rest in front of a distantly familiar building: a club. She knows this place. There is no temperature here, and yet, she feels a sharp coldness creep into the skin along her neck.

Through the nonexistent walls of the building’s ghostly form, she can see something dark and angry pulse inside, like a storm cloud rolled into a ball. It whips about erratically, expanding slowly before violently collapsing in on itself again at seemingly random intervals. With each snap, the outline of the club around it shutters and twists. She puts a hand out towards the building and feels the waves of energy that emit from the strange cluster of writhing energy. It is a frequency she knows well:

>Pain.

Perhaps it is because she knows this pulse so well that it feels odd to her. Not entirely the same. It is tinged with something else, something unknown. Another frequency, pushed into the background by the more prominent pulse of pain. Almost imperceptible.

And then she is moving again, leaving the club behind and drifting through the hollow reality once more. She retraces invisible steps until she arrives at another familiar location. A school. From within, she can feel another pulse. This time, it is cold and somber like the dead city she walks through, tinged with a distant trace of something else, something odd. She thinks it is death, perhaps. Like the taste of rot drifting to her from some festering and unseen place.

How strange it is to think that even death must have a unique frequency: a slow and strangled tone that we must all pulse in due time.

She continues to walk, and for a time she is presented with nothing new, nothing recognizable. When at last she comes to stand beneath the shape of a large bridge, she feels familiarity twitch in her gut once more. But as she waits, the sensation fizzles into nothingness. She stands before the structure, empty like the streets. Silent like the void.

>Incorrect.

No. Not silent. She hears it now. A note, held constant and low beneath the idle buzz of existence.

All around her she can feel vibrations, as if the world-city itself is pulsing the peculiar frequency. It coalesces in her gut and she feels it sink into her soul, thick and heavy like toxic smog. The feeling resonates through her:

>Concern.

More than that, it feels like a siren. It feels like wrongness. Like…

>Error.

The frequency builds in intensity for a time, then grows softer and fades. It repeats this rising and falling in a cycle, like a circulating alarm. A warning.

For the first time in her life, the sizzle of static in her brain subsides completely. She inhales sharply in a moment of unexpected clarity.

But it doesn’t last. She feels something rise in her throat suddenly like a rapid swell of anxiety. Before she can swallow it down, it erupts.

The frequency crashes into her with the force of a transport drone barreling down the tracks, knocking her to the ground.

>Concern.

She feels that all-encompassing frequency again. It reverberates through her chest and through her mind, shaking her with enough force to cause spasms and shudders. She tries to brace herself against it, tries to regain control, but cannot.

The heavy note of the world-city’s frequency seems to compress her very consciousness, as if pressurizing her skull. She feels a thought inserted forcefully into her mind from somewhere beyond, as if injected into her brain matter with an auto-syringe. It bears no words, only emotions and impressions, and yet she understands it completely and perfectly. It says:

>Query: Administrator Required.

She feels several emotional frequencies flicker in her gut all at once, though it takes her a minute to realize that she is pulsing them. Deciphering specific frequencies feels impossible through the weight of the blaring, concerned frequency that presses down on her.

Still, she strains to focus, and feels her own pulse prickle in her electroreceptors and flutter in her gut. She tenses every muscle as tight as she can and pushes the pulse outwards with all her strength. Maybe she even cries out, she cannot be certain. The pulse comes out of her weak and rattling, squealing to no emotion in particular like a pressure valve badly in need of maintenance.

But she manages to maintain it. She holds it and holds it and lets the frequency cry out even as she feels her amp aching in her gut and her electroreceptors burning across her face like battery acid.

Moments later, her pulse is abruptly cut off by the sensation of several foreign thoughts being shoved into her mind once more. Her body spasms and tenses like before as her brain translates the odd tangle of mental impulses. They say:

>Administrator Detected...

>Query: Status.

>Status Detected...

The frequency of the world continues to wail. As the pulse washes over her again and again, she feels it shift with each rising and falling of the siren-like frequency. After a few moments, she can identify a new note underlining the frequency. Then another. And another. Its layers slowly unravel before her.

As the siren begins to rise again, she can feel that it has clarified even further. She can isolate a single piece of it now that she hadn’t felt before: a low, resonant note that seems to blur her senses with its reverberation. It feels closer somehow.

A message in her mind says:

>Query Detected...

The world-pulse cries out once more, and she feels it stronger in her chest now when the message says:

>Operational Status Verified...

The siren no longer grows quieter, it only increases in intensity, rising rapidly in pitch. It rocks her brain in her skull until static is buzzing in her ears like a heartbeat.

>Administrator Status Verified...

The frequency pulses louder still, like footfalls growing closer and closer behind her.

The pulse vibrates her bones now and thuds in her ears like shaking metal drums. It is a search, a query, a spotlight. It is asking for her. Asking for her response.

A single note resonates through the static engulfing her existence and reverberates in her mind. She cries out. It beats once, like the final flutter of a dying heartbeat.

>Initializing Interface.

* * *

Wes took another bite of his seasoned grain bar, chewing thoughtfully as he bent down to retrieve the rubber ball at his feet. He gave it another light toss across the room like he had been doing again and again for the past hour or so. Plantboy’s cameras swiveled immediately to track the bouncing path of the ball as the drone scrambled to chase it down. Wes watched as Plantboy hopped along on its newly constructed legs. A moment later, it returned, rolling the small, black sphere back into the kitchen with its feet.

Plantboy looked up at Wes expectantly.

“Delivery confirmed!” it cheered.

Wes smiled and made a “be quiet” motion towards the drone, holding his hand out palm-down then lowering it.

“EJ’s still sleeping,” he reminded in a low voice.

“Delivery confirmed,” it said, its digital voice exactly the same as before but in a decreased volume.

“Yes, good job, you got the ball.”

“Please confirm your delivery?”

The drone shifted and adjusted its feet excitedly. Wes chuckled. Plantboy would seemingly never grow tired of this silly little game of theirs.

He picked up the ball and gave it another toss, then popped the rest of his grain bar into his mouth as the drone trotted off. Each toss of the ball bought him a few more moments to enjoy his breakfast before the drone would return to request further entertainment. Wes took a long drag from his mug to wash down the grain bar as Plantboy’s feet clunked around in the living room. The hot, golden-brown liquid was thick and spicy, and it made the inside of his mouth buzz with an enjoyable kind of acidic sensation. Wes could feel his brain revive a little bit more with each sip of the tincture.

On his media tablet, he scribbled out a quick to-do list in between tossed of the ball for Plantboy. When he was done, it read:

1-Clean kitchen

2-Greenhouse recharge station

3-Sanitize med tools

4-Check on EJ

5-Ping Hennil about plantboy(?)

Wes finished his drink with a gulp, rinsed the cup with water, and quickly ran it through the kitchen sterilizer before returning it to the proper storage compartment. Then, armed with a hand-held medical sterilizer and damp towel, he set to work cleaning the kitchen.

Soon enough, Plantboy wandered back over with the little rubber ball. The drone didn’t nudge the ball over to Wes or chime any of its courier voice lines. For a few minutes it just watched as Wes scrubbed on his hands and knees at the blotchy red stains in the wooden flooring. Then it hobbled over and watched directly over his shoulder as he worked. Wes stopped scrubbing and turned to look up at the drone, pulsing in a questioning, can-I-help-you sort of frequency.

The drone’s cameras glanced at Wes, then swiveled back to the floor. Wes turned his attention back to the floor, too, and slowly began to work the towel across the stain once more, tracing small circles in the wood. Plantboy shifted its weight over to its left leg—a movement which was only possible for the drone because of its new ankle mechanisms—and scraped little circles into the surface of the old flooring with its right foot, mimicking Wes’s movements.

Wes stopped scrubbing and looked to Plantboy.

“Please confirm your delivery?” it asked.

“Cleaning,” Wes explained, annunciating the word slowly and pantomiming his floor-scrubbing. “Like this. Clea-ning.”

Planyboy mimicked once more with its right foot.

“Just like that,” he encouraged, pulsing to confirmation. “Here.”

Wes crawled over to another blood stain on the floor and spread his towel over it. The towel was developing a growing pink spot in the center from where Wes had been working it across the blood stains.

“Clean,” he explained again, mimicking the scrubbing motion in the air.

Plantboy approached the towel on the floor, cautious and curious, both camera feeds transfixed by Wes’s demonstration. Wes stood up and stepped back, then motioned towards the towel. For a moment, the drone didn’t seem to understand. Then Wes made the cleaning motion with his foot overtop the towel, and the message seemed to click.

Plantboy stepped up, shifted its weight, and hovered a foot over the towel. It looked to Wes, who nodded and pulsed to confirmation in the standard, nonverbal ‘yes.’ Plantboy set its foot down on the towel.

I’ve reinvented sanitation drones, Wes thought to himself. With the intelligence of a toddler.

Plantboy’s heavy, metal foot pressed down on the thin towel and scraped across the stain in a circular motion. Wes winced at the sound of metal scraping through the thin towel fibers and grinding across old wood. The drone stopped and looked up at him expectantly.

“Please confirm your delivery?”

“Yeah, close enough,” Wes told it.

“Delivery confirmed!” the successful drone trumpeted.

Wes grabbed a few extra towels and layered them beneath Plantboy’s foot to prevent further wounds from being carved into his poor, old house. For the next hour, Plantboy seemed content to scrub the same spot in the floor as Wes tidied up the kitchen and sterilized the medical equipment he had used on EJ the night prior. When he checked in on the drone later, Plantboy’s movements were slow and stuttering.

“You alright, bud?”

The drone stopped scrubbing the floor. One camera flicked up to look at Wes, then the other followed, just a moment behind.

“De...liv...er...y?” the drone slurred, its robotic voice growing lower and quieter with each syllable of the word.

Ah, low battery, Wes recognized. I guess it takes a lot of energy to teach yourself how to retrieve a ball and clean floors.

Wes had completely moved beyond his initial worry and shock over the self-programming drone. He still had no idea what was causing the code anomaly he had observed, but it didn’t actively concern him anymore and he had given up on trying to explain the phenomenon. Maybe he was still too tired to find some rational explanation, or maybe he had simply found the child-like state of the drone to be too endearing to cause him any real alarm. Either way, the likelihood that Plantboy would develop intent to kill had steadily declined into the negatives with each toss and subsequent retrieval of the little, rubber ball.

It had been hours since Plantboy had first overridden its programming, and all the new lines of code that had popped up since then had been mundane. Most of them were extensions to the drone’s emotional response protocol or attempts at picking things up with its mechanical feet—none of which had succeeded.

Plantboy had taught itself a lot since the rebuild. Most recently it had taught itself the concept of cleaning. But, before that, it had figured out how to track and retrieve moving objects and how to pester Wes with digital voice lines if it wanted something. Wes was proud of his little robotic student.

“Come on, Plantboy,” he said, turning the sleepy drone around and herding it towards the back door and the greenhouse beyond. “Let’s get that charging bay set up for you.”

A short time later, Wes sat on the edge of his greenhouse bed, a charging plantboy slumbering at his feet. He watched the inactive drone for a time, thinking through ways to teach it things like retrieving specific tools or shifting the greenhouse configuration on its own. Then he laid back on the bed and stared up through the mostly translucent tiles of the greenhouse wall, watching the gray and navy clouds swirl overhead.

The rain hadn’t let up yet, and the dark, cool morning had transitioned seamlessly into a stormy and dour afternoon. Following the heat of the prior days, Wes welcomed the rain. Weather events were usually scheduled by the GCA’s Environmental Committee and announced on a sector-by-sector basis, but they sometimes sprang up at unscheduled times anyway—a byproduct of large-scale aeroforming, said the GCA. Wes wasn’t sure which category this particular weather event fell into, as he hadn’t bothered to check city central’s public information feed today.

He liked the darkness provided by the storm clouds. They made it feel like the night had continued to stretch into the day, like he still had time to get some sleep before waking up to an obnoxiously bright and boring morning.

Soon, Wes became distantly aware of his eyelids beginning to close on their own. The last thing he remembered thinking was:

It’s hard work teaching a newly sentient bot.

* * *

He awoke several hours later as the day pressed into evening. After a few groggy minutes of flickering in and out of sleep, he finally managed to keep his eyes open for longer than a few seconds. He stretched, then sat up and let his vision adjust to the low light of the greenhouse. It was still dark outside, which was a disorienting thing to wake up to. He wasn’t sure if he had accidentally dozed off into the late evening or if only minutes had passed, and the darkness outside was simply a byproduct of the weather.

Wes reached for the display screen nearby and checked the time. The day was already into its 14th hour—he had slept through the afternoon. That was frustrating, and he caught himself pulsing to annoyance. He hated waking up and feeling like the whole day was practically behind him, especially when he missed out on an afternoon. His self-observational studies had revealed that of the 30-hour day cycle he was at his most productive between the 7th and 12th hours. After making this discovery, he had reoriented himself to schedule around this 5-hour block of time. Hour-counting and time management had quickly become Wes’s way of life after starting classes. Scheduling made him feel prepared and productive, and helped avoid instances of sudden stress or anxiety brought about by not finishing various tasks. He enjoyed it so much that he had considered getting a neural time-link installed to help his brain digitally track the day and its events. It was a fairly common augment, especially by way of neural implants, but he hadn’t gone through with it after his first experience at the etching parlor.

Wes took a moment to pull up the scheduling program on his display tablet and suspend it. He hated throwing himself off-schedule with something as silly as an accidental nap, but he knew his body had needed the rest. Besides, he was only two days into his ten-day break from classes. He could get back to properly scheduled days once he was past the current dilemmas with self-programming AIs and injured strangers.

It was a lot to address all at once. Almost too much. He needed to find a good starting point for sorting all of this out. Real life problems weren’t anything like the ones he was assigned as classwork. They didn’t have neat steps to work through or clearly telegraphed starting points for finding a solution.

Wes got out of bed and stretched before crouching back down to check on the charging bay he had rigged up for Plantboy. The drone—or was it technically a bot now?—was gone for the time being, probably chasing the rubber ball in circles around the house or trying to scrub the floorboards again. Wes would have been concerned about the missing bot if his mind hadn’t become immediately absorbed in checking the results of recharging Plantboy.

The makeshift charging bay was simple—nothing more than a subverted powerline feeding off of the greenhouse solar cell array. Upon checking the greenhouse power consumption on his display surface, Wes found that Plantboy’s recharge had put less of a dent in his solar cell reserves than he had expected, which was great. Courier drones were designed to be incredibly efficient with their power usage, but Wes hadn’t been sure how his modifications would change that for Plantboy.

In designing Plantboy, Wes had calculated power drain for the new legs and come up with a theoretical battery up-time. But the math didn’t account for things like voltage drops or the various other issues that came with having your bot’s arms cut off. It certainly didn’t account for the sudden existence of a foreign AI, which could theoretically be consuming the bot’s battery with complex and hidden subroutines. Additionally, the bot’s heavier legs should have caused significant fluctuations in power usage. And yet, Wes hadn’t noticed any inconsistencies in battery drain when Plantboy had been running around the house earlier. The bot seemed to be maintaining the hyper-efficiency of its courier days, which shouldn’t have been the case for a number of reasons.

Wes was beginning to develop a new theory. Perhaps Plantboy was rerouting power from it’s old functions thanks to the new AI. The bot wasn’t a standard model courier anymore, and the increasingly intelligent part of it probably recognized that it didn’t need to expend power on things like trying to ping the delivery company with coordinates. He’d need to run some diagnostic tests on the bot to be sure. If Wes were even ten percent more awake, he probably could have calculated the bot’s exact battery drain. Afterall, he knew Plantboy’s estimated up-time since the rebuild as well as how much it had drained from the greenhouse in a single recharge cycle. He could compare that number to the expected battery drain he had calculated in his initial design of Plantboy, which would reveal if the AI were somehow maintaining battery efficiency. But that whole process would be complicated, and Wes was still waking up. He could find time for math later.

Besides, there was other, arguably more important, work to be done. He needed to check on his patient.

Wes straightened his posture and put on his medical professional face. He walked out of the greenhouse, through the rain, and into the back door of the house proper.

A recharged Plantboy greeted him in the kitchen with a blurted, digital voice line. Wes pulsed in greetings at the drone and bent down to its height as it waddled over to him.

“Feeling better?” he asked.

“Delivery confirmed!” came the response.

Wes smiled at the bot and gave it a general pulse to contentment.

“I’ll be right back,” he told the bot. “I’m going to see if EJ is up.”

Plantboy raised a foot and said:

“Delivery confirmed?”

“No more cleaning,” Wes explained, standing. “We can clean later.”

The bot slowly lowered its foot and swiveled its cameras about, clearly not comprehending the new idea being presented. It was an expression that Wes was interpreting as a sort of waiting, like the automatic standby command that occurred in most drones was being presented more as an emotional display than an actual need to stop and wait. Plantboy seemed to do the motion whenever it didn’t have a response prepared for a presented situation. This was apparently the bot-equivalent of saying “uh” or “um” when thinking. Wes guessed that there wasn’t much Plantboy was able to respond to outside of watering plants, chasing a ball, or cleaning.

Wes gave the bot a small pat on its chassis and left it to quietly sort out its own programmed responses.

He made his way to the living room and lightly pulsed a greeting at the door to the study. When he got no response, he added:

“Uh, hello?”

He pulsed again. Still no response, but he could feel the shape of a person lying in bed in his electrosenses.

Wes put a hand in his pocket and fidgeted with a .500 coin, rotating its edge along the tips of his fingers. His other hand hesitated over the release switch to the study door. His brain was fumbling through the first few steps of an arithmetic far more complicated than calculating Plantboy’s power usage.

Should I go in? he wondered.

He had told EJ that he was a GCA certified medic. Did she know what that entailed? She hadn’t questioned Wes’s little lie about his professional status, and he had assumed that she had a general understanding of the GCA’s medical system just as he did. If they were in the applied, he’d be checking on her at hourly scheduled intervals for up to a week after time of injury, potentially longer. Certified medics were legally required to treat a patient to the best of their abilities until the patient reached their governmentally appointed recovery status—as set by the GCA guidelines. It required a lot of forms to be filled out for both the patient and the medic, and Wes was grateful that he wasn’t actually GCA certified yet.

Naturally, he understood the whole process. He had been required to study the system and walk people through it. But he was a contracted AM-Peer student. Thinking about it now, it probably wasn’t fair to assume that EJ thought about the injury-recovery process in the same way. Would she be expecting him to check on her? She definitely didn’t seem like the kind of person who would want any form of care or medical supervision, but then again, Wes didn’t know what kind of person she seemed like at all.

Wes could feel his palms beginning to itch.

She was probably still asleep. All he needed to do was open the door and quietly make sure she wasn’t putting too much pressure on her arm or neck. It would be a basic patient check-in, that was all. What was he so nervous about? Being intrusive? Invading privacy? No, Wes had long ago learned to work past such concerns when dealing with patients. He had wiped people clean of their own blood and bile, hand-stitched gashes in uncomfortable places, even clothed patients down to the undergarments when they couldn’t do it themselves. None of that bothered him anymore. It was just another part of the life he had signed up for. So if that wasn’t the hold up, why was he so anxious now, standing before the door to the study?

Wes knew the answer.

The door to the study safely locked away a problem that he had been willfully ignoring all day. A dangerous problem.

Wes still had no idea why the All-Seers were after EJ or what he had gotten himself into by offering to help her. Thinking about it for even a short period of time made his pulse pitch towards anxious frequencies.

Had he made a mistake in helping EJ? Would the All-Seers be after him too, or was EJ secretly the greater threat? His brain conjured up every worst-case scenario it could imagine and presented to him the goriest bits of them all one by one in rapid succession. Perhaps she was an augment trafficker, or a bounty hunter, or worse. He wouldn’t know until she slit his throat or cut him open to sell pieces of him on the underground swapper market. Not knowing if or how he had put himself in danger was eating at him from the inside out.

Wes shivered as his electrosenses became aware of the anxious pulse seeping from his gut like blood from a bullet wound. It was a cold and familiar frequency that tickled in his neck and chilled the receptor spots in his face. In busying himself with Plantboy and the house chores, he had managed to ignore the situation and pretend like it had been any other normal day. But now the floodgates had been opened and the anxiety was pouring out freely. He pulled his hand from his pocket and itched both of his palms until the itching had been replaced with hot, stinging red streaks left by his nails.

He couldn’t bring himself to open the door, couldn’t bring himself to face all the unknown factors of the situation he found himself in. He was shaking now.

A little piece of his brain whispered that if even a single one of his anxieties about EJ and the All-Seers were based in reality, he was already dead anyway. So really, it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter if his choices got him shot by the All-Seers or cut open by the stranger sleeping in his study. After all, he had died a while ago—back when he made the decision to help her and involve himself. No, it was even before then, wasn’t it? He couldn’t recall precisely when, but it didn’t matter anymore. He needed to accept that. He needed to just open the door and face the danger that pulsed silently to violent frequencies just beyond. It was like staring down his own severed head.

To his frantic mind, this thought was oddly comforting. If he didn’t care what happened to him, then the imaginary and deadly consequences of helping EJ couldn’t really hurt him. Nothing could at that point.

Apathy was an insidious but helpful tool, and Wes drank it up out of desperate habit.

His mind wriggled free of the anxious thoughts assailing him and slipped into the quiet and empty safety of forgetful indifference. Wes felt his energy drain almost immediately and the thumping heartbeat in his chest suddenly felt alien to him, like he had sprinted across the entire world-city but completely forgotten about it somehow.

Why was he worried, again? He had been in the middle of something, though the specifics of his task now felt incorporeal, lying just beyond the reach of his recollection.

Well, he thought. I’m standing in front of the study. Was I going to do classwork?

Wes wiped his palms on his smock. Static, he was sweaty. Was it really that hot in here? He began to reach towards the door’s release switch when he caught a glimpse of something moving beneath him.

Wes glanced down at the small, rubber ball that had rolled to a stop at his feet. He turned around and found Plantboy standing directly behind him, as if waiting in line to enter the study. The bot seemed apprehensive somehow, like a small child anticipating the response of a disapproving parent. It shifted about on its new legs, both of its cameras not meeting Wes’s gaze directly as they usually did.

“Oh, hey bud. You alright?”

“Please confirm your delivery?” chimed Plantboy quietly.

“Oh this?” Wes said, picking up the ball and pulsing to amusement. “You want this?”

Plantboy didn’t respond with a voiceline, but at the sight of the ball, the bot completely shed its anxious stance in just a fraction of a second. It crouched suddenly and both cameras snapped up to look at the ball. Static hissed from the speaker in its chest. That was a new response that Wes hadn’t heard before, but its meaning was abundantly clear, so he gave the ball a good toss across the living room and watched it bounce along the floor.

Plantboy tore off after the ball, almost toppling itself in the process. Wes chuckled and walked back towards his the kitchen.

As he did so, a thought from after his nap returned to him, and he recalled what he had been working on. He had come into the house looking for Plantboy after its first recharge cycle, hadn’t he? Yes, that had to be it. He needed to test his new theory about the bot's power usage and adjust the charging bay accordingly. For now, whatever task needed completing in the study could be put-off just a little bit longer.

“I don’t know what in first, second, and third iterations you are, bud,” Wes said, mostly to himself. “But I swear on the fourth and fifth I’m gonna figure it out.”