ch2 · Dev'ing Zero

After days and countless assurances of support, Siah, Garren, and Cam finally went home. All appreciated, all of it goes without saying. She is loved. She is missing her love. A new life to live now. Greatly diminished. Also goes without saying. Now, left to her thoughts, she gets to work. It didn’t take long to draw up the initial schematic, gather the foundational components, and piece them together for prototyping. The bare-bones structure is pieced together.

“Get up.” she says quietly, full of intent.

The workshop is dim. Always has been. It’s not really a workshop. Just a space in the corner of their half-buried home, out in a sea of snow dunes. Too far to have company. Too quiet for guilt. Still hears his voice when the house creaks against the wind. Which is why she decided to stay.

"Look at me," she says with forced tenderness.

The optics jitter. Unstable without the faceplate and head casing, which rest nearby, tipped sideways like an interrupted idea in mid-thought. She leans in, watches the optics search for a subject to focus on. They flicker like eyes that used to see her.

"You can do it. Get up." Vae coaxes it, stern but loving. She waits for the droid to comply.

Garren and Siah would call this insane. Half the Chain would avoid her, if they knew what she was attempting. The slightest evidence of building a machine is already dangerous. But constructing a person? Reassembling a life lost? That is another kind of forbidden, even among smugglers of circuit boards and back room whispers of old AI theories.

But this isn’t theoretical. This is Dev. And she couldn’t not try.

Pinned to the wall, above the robot, is the schematic. Notes and labels are sketched all over the line drawing of a fully upright, impressive, head-to-toe droid. It looks nothing like the heap on the table.

Vae reaches into the droid’s torso, positions her hand under a hover mechanism, and taps it up to give it a slight nudge. This is the crux of the design: a hover device meant to give its apparatus a sense of balance and keep it upright. She wants it to be his heart because it’s the most important component. Without it, it wouldn’t be able to walk or carry anything over a kilo. Truthfully, it’d have no chance of becoming him.

"Look at me. C'mon. Up we go."

She gives the rickety droid a few gentle taps. It starts to move on its own. The optical components lock on to her, sort of. Through magnetic winching, it starts to find its balance.

"That's it."

It doesn’t sit up very far before it begins to struggle, then swings along the spinal hinge. It slinks over and off the workbench, smashing sideways. Sparks fly. A shoulder plate skitters across the floor.

Vae bites down hard, then opens his chest. Rewires the core. Swaps regulators. Reinforces the spinal brace. Each change is a counter argument to the schematic’s flawed design. Revisions at first, like a productive form of grieving, until it starts to feel less like him and more like failure.

She carves the design down to its simplest bones. But the mechanism doesn’t hold. Balance slips every time. The hover core thrums, catches, then fails. Like trying to levitate a magnet above its counterpart—elegant in theory, doomed in practice.

She keeps chasing the moment when it just works. That single, undeniable sign that it’s not wishful math. That she didn’t lose him for nothing.

More parts are removed. More iterations fail. Until one night, after falling to the floor one last time, she simply stops. Sits at the bench, blinks at the cold metal, and walks away. She mopes around the house aimlessly until falling asleep on a chair in the corner.

Days pass.

A fine layer of dust begins to settle across everything—tools, cables, even the schematic. She doesn’t clean it. Doesn’t touch the bench. The droid gathers more dust.

She tells herself she’ll wipe it all down tomorrow. She doesn’t.

One day, she hums what might’ve been a song, off-key. She loses the rhythm half-way, forgets what comes next. The silence that follows feels out of sync. Broken.

Another day, she stops herself from crying. Later that night, she surrenders the struggle and weeps on the floor.

One morning, slivers of sunlight streak across the floor as she tidies up. Another afternoon, boredom masks her numbness. She scrubs carbon deposits from intake valves. Each part, spotless, serving as a distraction. Precision for the sake of motion.

Then she notices him again.

The head. That orb chassis. Sitting still in the middle of the floor where she left it. The dust makes it a shade lighter. Light catches its scuffed surface. As if she hadn't seen it before.

She traces the contour of the head with her finger, half-hoping it will react or flicker. She picks it up and returns it to the workbench.

Maybe it doesn’t need to be him. Maybe it’s just a project. Something to keep her hands busy and her thoughts contained. That’s all. Just an old hobby. Not a resurrection.

She tells herself that—and hates how easy the lie comes.

She allows her mind to review what had gone wrong. Power surge here. Tilt axis not balanced. Hover core might be misaligned. Hard to tell. Every failure plays back like bad music—out of tune and insultingly familiar. She glances at the schematic on the wall.

No. She thinks, shaking her head. She regrets feeling hope. She turns to walk away, maybe for good, but her hand bumps it.

And the orb lifts up.

Just the  chassis. Nothing else. It floats a half-inch from the bench, humming soft and clean. Perfect balance. No sparks. No tilt. No celebration either. It simply hovers—steady and small. The sort of result you’d log, label, and build on.

But for her, this moment catches like a thread pulling tight through the fabric. She doesn’t move. She doesn’t breathe. If this is success, it’s quieter than she imagined.

Her jaw relaxes. Not hope. Not joy. Just observation.

"Hey."

She moves in closer, allowing herself to wonder for just a second… "Are you with me?"

Then, the voice. Crackling. Not his voice. Not even close.

"Diagnostics... complete." Its optical components lock onto her but maintain a thousand-yard stare.

She desperately keeps still, hoping it will prevent the light in her eyes, the hope, from escaping the room.

She puts her hand under where the droid’s cheek might be. It drifts too far from the power core and drops back to the workbench with a hollow clink.

She doesn’t scream in agony. Doesn’t cry. She meets its gaze.

Just a project she repeats to herself.

A quiet pause. Finally, she nods.

"It's okay. You'll be okay." To herself.

Chapter 3: Months Later →

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