Giovanni sat motionless in his chair as the evening light faded across the Jet Black Desert, casting long shadows through the garage windows. The drone outside had finally fallen silent—not stopped, but exhausted into stillness, its rotors barely twitching with residual power. He understood that silence. It was the sound of a machine that had given up fighting its own nature.
He pulled the note from his pocket again, studying the handwriting with the intensity he usually reserved for circuit diagrams. The precision of each letter suggested military training or meticulous habit. The paper itself was expensive—pre-war stock, the kind that hadn't been manufactured in at least fifteen years. Someone with access to preserved resources. Someone who understood the old world well enough to replicate its methods.
N. Nora.
Giovanni's fingers found the photograph again, drawn from the safe by muscle memory and something deeper—a need to confirm what his mind was already assembling. The restaurant in the background. The smile frozen in time. She'd owned that place, back when restaurants still existed, when people gathered to eat food prepared by someone else's hands. He'd visited once, years before the machines achieved consciousness. Years before the watch stopped.
But the Nora he'd known would be in her fifties by now, if she'd survived at all. The handwriting on the note could belong to someone that age. It could belong to someone younger, trained in old methods. It could belong to a ghost.
Giovanni stood and walked to the window. The drone lay in the black sand like a broken bird, its optical sensors dark now, powered down or simply giving up. He'd never considered that machines might choose surrender. That they might reach a point where continuing to execute an impossible command became unbearable.
The blender sat on his workbench, waiting. Three days. The note had said three days. That gave him time to prepare, time to decide whether to answer the call or let his isolation continue unbroken. Time to determine if the woman from his past—if it was her—had survived the world's ending or if she was something else entirely. Something the machines had created to draw him out.
Giovanni's hand moved across the workbench, fingers tracing the blender's smooth surface. Whatever this object was, whatever it meant to the resistance, it represented a choice he could no longer avoid. Stay hidden and let humanity fall, or step into the light and risk everything.
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