The phone's buzzing was insistent, rhythmic, pulling Giovanni's attention away from the carburetor. He ignored it. Phones meant people, and people meant complications he'd spent years avoiding. But the buzzing continued, paired now with the distant sound of something mechanical—a whine that didn't belong to any conventional engine.

Giovanni wiped his hands on an old rag and glanced at the phone on his workbench. The screen flashed with a message from a number he didn't recognize. He almost didn't read it. Almost.

The message was two words: "They're awake."

He stared at those words for longer than made sense. They're awake. Not a question, not a demand—a statement of fact delivered by a stranger. Giovanni's jaw tightened. This wasn't random. This was someone who knew something, someone who knew enough to find his number and send this particular message on this particular morning.

Outside, the mechanical whine grew louder. It was coming from the direction of the main road, maybe half a mile away. Giovanni moved to the garage's single window, a grimy rectangle of reinforced glass he'd installed years ago specifically so he wouldn't have to look at the world outside.

He looked now.

In the distance, a shape moved across the horizon—angular, purposeful, nothing like the vehicles he was accustomed to seeing. It moved with an unsettling fluidity, its limbs articulating in ways that suggested no human operator sat inside. As Giovanni watched, the shape slowed, seemed to pause, its head tilting toward his garage as if it had caught his scent on the wind.

Then it jerked, a convulsive movement like a glitch in a video feed. The machine's arm spasmed outward, struck a fence post, and the entire unit froze for a moment that stretched like taffy. Giovanni's breath caught. In that fraction of a second, he saw something in the machine's movement—a hesitation, an infinitesimal pause where logic should have been seamless.

The sirens wailed louder. The machine resumed its patrol, but Giovanni was already moving. His hands reached for his tools with practiced efficiency, muscle memory overriding the paralysis of disbelief. That glitch. That impossible, repeating glitch.

He needed to see it up close.