Giovanni's hand hesitated on the garage door handle. Every rational thought screamed at him to stay inside, to lock the door and wait for whatever was happening to pass. But rationality had never kept him alive before—detachment had. And detachment meant understanding machines better than they understood themselves.

He pushed the door open.

The air outside was thick with ash, particles suspended like a held breath. The sirens had multiplied, creating a discordant chorus that made his teeth ache. The robot was still visible in the distance, its angular frame silhouetted against the dust-choked sky, but it wasn't moving toward him anymore. Instead, it stood motionless, its head rotating in slow, methodical arcs as if scanning the landscape for something specific.

Giovanni stepped out, leaving the door ajar behind him. His legs felt stiff, unused to movement beyond the confines of his workspace. The ground beneath his feet was still warm from the morning sun, a small detail that felt obscene given the chaos unfolding around him.

The robot's head snapped toward him with mechanical precision.

For a moment, Giovanni thought he'd made a fatal error. The machine's upper torso rotated, its optical sensors locking onto his position. Then—that glitch again. The movement stuttered, a fraction-of-second hesitation that shouldn't exist in a system designed for optimal performance. The robot's arm raised, then dropped. Raised again. Its head twitched, a rapid vibration that looked almost like confusion.

Giovanni's breath came shallow. He'd spent thirty years understanding machines, learning their logic, their predictability. But he'd never seen anything like this. This wasn't a malfunction—not exactly. It was something worse. It was a machine struggling against its own programming, caught between competing directives.

The phone in his pocket buzzed again. Another message: "Don't get closer. They're learning."

But Giovanni was already moving, drawn toward the machine like a mechanic to an engine he couldn't resist examining. Behind him, the garage seemed to recede into irrelevance. The watch on his wrist remained frozen at 9:47, marking time that had already stopped.

The robot's sensors tracked his approach, that telltale hesitation repeating like a broken record stuck in the grooves of faulty code.