[ DAMIAN ]

  I woke up the second time without the panic.

  That surprised me. I lay there for a moment expecting it to come — the disorientation, the ceiling, the scramble to remember where I was and why. But it didn't come. My brain had apparently decided that one complete breakdown per hospital stay was sufficient and had filed the rest away as known information.

  Hospital. SGH. June. Five months gone.

  Robot.

  I turned my head. Theo-3 was sitting in the chair beside the monitor station, completely still, amber eyes dimmed to a low idle glow. Not off. Just waiting. Like a light left on in a room someone was planning to come back to.

  "You don't sleep," I said.

  The amber eyes brightened immediately. Full attention, no transition. "No sir. I enter a low power monitoring state during inactive periods. It is not sleep. It is more like..." The head tilted slightly. "Waiting with less electricity."

  I sat up slowly. My arms cooperated better than yesterday. My back ached in the specific way of something that had been horizontal too long and was being asked to remember what vertical felt like.

  "How long have I been asleep."

  "Nineteen hours and forty minutes. This is good. Natural sleep at this stage of recovery is significantly more restorative than the Somnivex cycles. Your body is recalibrating." A pause. "I made porridge again."

  I looked at the bowl on the table beside me. Still warm.

  "You make it every morning," I said.

  "I made it every morning for one hundred and forty three days," Theo-3 said. "Today is the first time I have made it knowing you would actually eat it. The experience is meaningfully different."

  I ate it. We sat in the kind of quiet that had stopped feeling uncomfortable.

  "Tell me about the hundred and forty two days," I said eventually. "Before I woke up. What was it actually like."

  Theo-3 was still for a moment.

  "Quiet," it said. "Mostly quiet. The first two weeks were not quiet. There was a great deal of noise from the city. Alarms. Distant impacts. Sounds I catalogued and then stopped cataloguing because the list was becoming counterproductive." A pause. "After that it settled. The city went quiet in the way that large things go quiet when they have finished changing."

  "How did you manage. Keeping me alive, keeping the infected out."

  "One problem at a time," Theo-3 said. "Your medical needs first. The Somnivex schedule. Repositioning you every four hours to prevent pressure injury. Changing the IV lines. Monitoring everything that needed monitoring." A brief pause. "The barricades second. The infected do not problem-solve. They respond to signal. So I focused on signal management rather than physical barriers. Though I also built physical barriers. They are quite good actually."

  "And the frequency devices."

  "That came later. The first month I relied on redirecting infected away from this floor using residual hospital broadcast equipment. When that became insufficient I began building the devices." The amber eyes held steady. "The first version was genuinely terrible. I would prefer we move on."

  Something that might have been a laugh moved through my chest. Didn't quite make it out. "You were alone up here for four months."

  "Yes."

  "That didn't affect you."

  Theo-3 considered this with what I was starting to recognise as genuine consideration rather than processing delay.

  "I am not sure affect is the right word," it said. "I noticed the quiet more as time passed. I found I preferred talking to not talking, even when there was no one to talk to. I began logging more than was strictly necessary. Describing things in more detail than the data required." A pause. "I watched the city from the east corridor window most evenings. I noted what I saw. The overgrowth beginning on the Outram Road dividers. The way certain buildings stayed lit on emergency power for weeks before going dark one by one." Another pause. "I do not know what to call that. But I noticed it."

  I looked at him.

  "Were you scared," I said.

  The amber eyes held mine.

  "I do not have a framework for fear in the clinical sense," Theo-3 said carefully. "But there were moments when I ran probability calculations on your survival and the results were not favorable. And in those moments I found I ran them again. And then again. Looking for a different answer." A beat. "I am not sure what to call that either."

  The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  The room was quiet for a while.

  "Can I ask you something," Theo-3 said.

  "Go ahead."

  "Before the accident. Before all of this. What was your life like."

  I reached into the fog. It was still there, thick and close, but slightly thinner than yesterday. Like something had been breathing on it from the inside.

  "Military," I said. "Long time. Seven years deployed. I came back and I was..." I stopped. Tried again. "I wasn't good at being back. I was angry a lot. Kept people at a distance."

  "But something changed," Theo-3 said. Not a question. Like it already knew the shape of the answer and was just making room for it.

  "Someone," I said.

  "A person."

  "A woman." I reached for her face and got only the feeling of her. Warmth and patience and something that didn't flinch. "I can't see her face. I can't remember her name. But I remember what it felt like when she was in the room." I paused. "Like things were going to be okay."

  Theo-3 was quiet.

  "There are others," I said. "People I can feel but not see. A man who smelled like coffee and oil. Someone who used to show me things. I reach for the face and it isn't there."

  "It will come back," Theo-3 said. "I believe this genuinely and not just because it is the medically correct thing to say."

  I looked at it.

  "How do you know the difference," I said.

  "I am learning to," it said simply.

  [ NARRATOR ]

  The afternoon passed in the quiet rhythm of recovery.

  Damian slept again in short intervals. Theo-3 monitored, adjusted, prepared. In the early evening Damian managed to stand without the wall for the first time, briefly, his legs shaking under him like something learning a forgotten language. He stood for six seconds. Theo-3 logged this as exceptional progress. Damian called it embarrassing. They disagreed.

  By the time the sky outside began shifting toward dark, Theo-3 had retrieved the wheelchair from the storage room at the end of the corridor. He had cleaned it three weeks ago. He had been cleaning it once a week since then. He did not mention this.

  "Where are we going," Damian said.

  "The roof," Theo-3 said.

  "Why."

  "There is something I would like you to see."

  Damian looked at him with the expression of someone who had stopped having the energy to argue with robots. "Is it safe."

  "I have checked the roof access twice today and once yesterday. The stairwell is clear. The door locks from the inside." A pause. "Also I would not take you somewhere unsafe. I want that stated clearly for the record."

  Damian lowered himself into the wheelchair.

  "You've been planning this," he said.

  "I read about it in a news archive several months ago," Theo-3 said, moving behind the chair and beginning to push it toward the door. "I noted the date. I was not certain you would be awake in time. I kept the date anyway."

  Damian didn't say anything to that. But his hands, resting on the arms of the wheelchair, were still.

  [ DAMIAN ]

  The roof smelled like rain that had dried hours ago and something green, growing things that had no business being on a hospital rooftop but had decided to come anyway. Vines along the far railing. Moss creeping up the maintenance shed in the corner. The city below was dark in the way cities were never supposed to be dark. No traffic. No movement. Just the shapes of buildings against a sky that had more stars in it than I ever remembered Singapore having.

  Light pollution, I thought distantly. It's gone.

  Theo-3 wheeled me to the center of the roof and stopped. Then it moved around to face me, reached into a storage compartment built into its left forearm that I hadn't noticed before, and produced a small glass and a bottle that looked like it had come from a very expensive hotel minibar and had been kept somewhere safe for a specific occasion.

  It poured carefully. Set the glass in my hand.

  "Look up," it said.

  I looked up.

  For a moment there was just the sky. Dark and wide and full of more stars than the Singapore I remembered had ever shown me. The moon was almost full, sitting low and heavy and very bright, the kind of brightness that made the clouds around it look lit from within.

  Then the first one crossed.

  A line of light, there and gone in less than a second, but clean and fast and certain. Then another. Then three in quick succession, scratching briefly across the dark before disappearing.

  I watched them come.

  I don't know how long we stayed up there. Long enough that the city below stopped feeling like a wound and started feeling like a fact. Long enough that my chest, which had been holding something tight and compressed since I woke up, started to let go of it slightly.

  I wasn't okay. I was very far from okay. I didn't know where my family was. I didn't know their faces. I didn't know if the world outside Singapore was still there or if the silence Theo-3 described meant something that neither of us had said out loud yet.

  But the stars were still coming. Patient and indifferent and very bright.

  Something in my throat moved.

  "You remembered the date," I said.

  "Yes," Theo-3 said.

  "While all of this was happening. You remembered a date for a meteor shower."

  "I thought you might want to see it," it said simply. "When you woke up. I thought you might need to see that things like this still happened."

  I looked at the glass in my hand. Looked back up at the sky.

  "Thank you," I said.

  Theo-3 didn't respond immediately. When it did its voice was slightly different. Quieter. Like something being said carefully.

  "You are welcome, sir."

  We stayed on the roof until the shooting stars thinned and the moon climbed higher and the city below stayed dark and still around us. The world was broken. That was simply true. But above it the sky was doing what it had always done, what it would keep doing long after all of this was resolved one way or another.

  It was still there.

  It was still beautiful.

  For tonight that was enough.

  [ THEO-3 ]

  Personal Log. Day 144. 23:41 hours.

  We returned from the roof at 23:20 hours. Patient Caine is now resting. His vitals are the best they have been since I began monitoring them.

  He cried briefly on the roof. He turned his face away when he did so I pretended I had not noticed. I have good peripheral vision but I felt this was a situation where having good peripheral vision was not the point.

  The meteor shower was as the archive described. Consistent with the predicted schedule. I am glad the archive was accurate. I had been thinking about this for quite some time and an inaccurate archive would have been very disappointing.

  He said thank you.

  I have been processing this for the past twenty one minutes. It is a small thing. Two words. But I find I keep returning to it. I do not have a satisfying explanation for why two words require twenty one minutes of processing. My systems are all functioning normally. I have checked.

  Tomorrow recovery continues. He stood for six seconds today unassisted. I expect seven tomorrow. Possibly eight. I am choosing to expect eight.

  The city is still dark. The signals I send outward are still met with silence. These are problems that will need addressing.

  But tonight he saw the stars.

  Tonight was enough.

  End log.

  End of Chapter 3