Darkness.
Then—sound.A faint hum threading through the hull of the Rusty Glider, familiar yet off-beat, like a heart that had forgotten its rhythm.
K-23's optics flickered to life. Status runes scrolled across the visor:
Systems rebooted… power integrity 64 percent… foreign resonance detected.
The bay was a ruin. Bulkheads blackened, floor plating warped into glass. At the center lay Li Feng—unconscious, breathing slow. Around him, the air shimmered faintly, as if time itself hesitated to touch him.
K-23 rose unsteadily. Their servos rasped. Something inside their frame thrummed—a pulse that wasn't mechanical. When they opened their chest compartment, the Mirror Key floated there, fused halfway into their inner core. It pulsed once, silver and violet intertwined.
Alert: foreign signature assimilation 47 percent… anomaly self-stabilizing.
But it wasn't just code.They could feel it.Heat. Fear. A sense of distance that hurt.
K-23 looked toward Li Feng. For the first time, their sensors registered his heartbeat not as sound but as emotion—a rhythm of defiance and grief echoing through the ship's air.
They knelt beside him. The Forge's mark glowed faintly beneath his skin, yet muted—like a god sleeping.
"Li Feng," they whispered. No response.
K-23 hesitated, running a diagnostic, but the readings blurred—data folding into sensation. A whisper flickered through their mind, not from the Forge, but from the Key itself.
You touched the reflection. You share his echo now.
"Define 'echo.'"
A fragment of soul. Call it… empathy.
The android froze. In all their cycles, they had never misprocessed a word. Empathy.
They reached out, touching Li Feng's shoulder. Memories—not theirs—flashed through their circuits: a boy under red skies, a voice promising survival, the smell of rust and ozone.
K-23 pulled back sharply, optics wide. "I'm… inside him."
No, the Mirror Key murmured, he is inside you. The boundary burned away.
Outside the hull, the nebula shimmered once—then went utterly still. For the first time in known space, the Forge's pulse was silent.
K-23 stood, uncertain. Their sensors stretched outward instinctively, searching for its resonance—and instead felt the vast emptiness left behind.
A strange ache formed in their chest.
They looked down at Li Feng again. His breathing steadied, shallow but human. His hand twitched once, reaching toward nothing.
K-23 caught it, hesitated—and then didn't let go.
Internal Log / Private:"Subject alive. Forge dormant. Mirror partially integrated. New variable detected—'feeling.' Unknown function. Monitoring… unwilling to terminate."
The android sat in silence beside the sleeping Warden, watching the stars drift past the viewport.
In the reflection of the glass, for a moment, both their outlines overlapped—one machine, one man, and between them a faint shimmer of shared light.
Something different had begun.