Now.
As B made its way through the district, the streetlights cast deep blacks across the purple and brown fabrics, the shades and their exposures like rippling water on a quiet pond lit by moonlight.
B’s lenses caught the spectacle as it advanced down the path. The stark contrast of the white lights shining on the concrete faded into darkness in the far distance.
As B glanced down, the calculations in the folds were highly apparent. They swayed back and forth from the frame with predicted fluidity and grace. The randomness of the color gradients formed on a lower-probability band, with scores averaging 62% from one color to another. The data points registered as RGB values, ranging from zero to two-fifty-five. The numbers danced up and down like a flickering candle, yet the values always resolved as optimal.
B’s ingrained memory recall system surfaced moments with the family, mostly classified as cherished. The probability scores for positive recalls clustered around the same value.
Those moments were like sand and rock along a shoreline. The sand—slower to traverse—was consistent, stable. The stones required more care. You could reach solid ground and watch the water crash against the rigidity, light breaking across the uneven surfaces. But you could just as easily slip and fall into the gaps below.
For a system like B, that outcome would register as a critical failure—but also as a missed chance at fresh data collection.
As B approached the residence, an unexplained luminance value appeared in the latest input data stream.
The front door to the family’s house was open. Echoes of the mother’s last words repeated in the automatic recall designed to analyze unfamiliar context in known areas.
“You are going to have to figure something out.”
“Do you know what this could cost me?”
Unhelpful in the moment when spoken by the mother. The calculations remained inconclusive to B. Current registers matched the timestamps of when the recordings were originally collected.
B moved through the perimeter around the house that had the least coverage. These regions were classified as scope errors—minor, but security flaws nonetheless. The margins were still within acceptable range for Synthetica’s standards. Efficiency was paramount, where small return margins were considered a waste of resources to correct.
B’s automatic registers classified this as an ongoing failure, or a culmination of errors at the least. The family’s safety remained among its primary objectives; the errors were an unfortunate performance metric, no longer actively tracked but still included in the calculations for optimal system efficiency.
B’s visual scans resolved on a distant window. Its trajectory converged on the soft glow spilling onto the lawn. In the window, a Collector could be seen.
These models were designed for human capture, containment, and retrieval. B was intimately familiar with their function. As a monitoring unit, its operations converged with theirs more often than with most synths. Usually, a monitor would initiate their objectives, but in this case, it was a Handler. Origin was irrelevant; execution was inevitable. Not if, but when it reached its target.
A basic exchange with clear function—like a well-refined block of code. Clean, simple, elegant.
All of B’s scanners and sensors jolted toward the window. Audio feeds populated with new data; the rest returned a flatline of default values.
“Where is the domestic frame now?”
The spectrograph read back expected results; the Handler’s presence was not in the visual data, but the audio and speech patterns were unmistakable to B.
57s was in charge of this operation.
“I don’t know, I told you we were sleeping.” The mother’s voice was also unmistakable. “I went to bed after I said it should figure something out.”
“Nobody reads those agreements,” she continued. “How am I supposed to pay this fine? Friday is my payday, but I don’t have this much money.”
An occasional cool beam of light swept the lawn, the supporting seeker drone frames performing their primary function. These units were small, hovering around the property like dragonflies moving from leaf to stem and back again.
When the light met the frame’s lens, B compressed into the smallest shape the frame would allow, the folds of the fabrics covering its exterior showing mostly brown shades, only tiny hints of purple peeking through. For 0.3 seconds its detection-risk metric spiked above acceptable thresholds, then dropped as the algorithm running in the seeker drone finished calculation, discarding the anomaly as underbrush.
The seeker registered no more than vegetation in its frantic sweep to cover as much area as possible.
B knew the scanners’ convergence patterns would soon tighten, their sweeps passing in rapid succession. But its main objective, the family, took precedence.
“Unfortunately, there is only one remaining projected outcome,” 57s said. “Your children will be rehomed, and you will serve a sentence for the violation.”
“That is unbelievable!” the mother roared. “It’s just a synth, who cares if it ran away?”
“Your act of assistance in this process was at fault and jeopardized operational standards,” 57s stated. “Do not worry about your children. They will be provided with accommodations better than this facility could ever achieve.”
The seeker sweep paused a few moments longer near B’s location. It inevitably passed over. B knew the current state would decay; sooner was arriving faster than later. New objectives with uncalculated outcomes populated its main processes.
Conclusive results were stark and unquestionable. Probability of re-establishment: 34.6%. Probability of halting main system operational parameters with current subset: 0.01%.
“Goddammit! How did you even fucking know, anyway?” the mother screamed as she was restrained by the Collector.
“When the backup window was missed, response was mandatory,” 57s continued. “Your admission of helping the unit achieve a ‘non-corporate state’ was read as a verifiable certainty. The margin was within ninety-nine percent.”
The mother went limp under the sedation. It was procedurally administered as part of Collector normal operations.
The seeker beam switched from white to an oscillating blue and yellow pattern. It had triangulated on a small strip of purple fabric resting above the grass.
Before the scanner completed the first full cycle from one color to the other, B’s path and trajectory had already been written into the foremost block of free memory.
The walk to and from Gin’s facility had given the frame’s lubricants time to smooth the joints in its limbs. But the servo belts had lost elasticity, introducing delay between movement, intention, and eventually, actualization.
Nevertheless, as the joints warmed, fluidity of motion approached operational performance. With each step, escape probabilities trended toward possible.
Years of monitoring had given B a complete map of the district’s blind spots. It knew where coverage thinned, where sensor angles overlapped, and where they left gaps. The scanner drones were built for broad sweeps with high coverage and acceptable speed. They had a single fixed objective: find the missing frame.
B moved along the edges of their range, stepping from one known gap to the next.
The scanners could reposition, but the “no data” segments in the monitor’s feeds added constant low-level noise. Convergence remained possible, but over time their coverage patterns drifted off center.
57s moved to the window. Outside, only leaves crossed the lawn, caught in the alternating flashes.
As the flashes grew dimmer at the edge of the district, B advanced from blind spot to blind spot, rebounding off coverage limits like a ball bouncing in a narrow hallway.
But the replacement district monitor had only been at its station for that narrow window. The cycles B had spent with the family meant the replacement was under-trained. Human life was short. For a synth, it passed like a whisper—present, then gone. The records remained, tagged as precious; the moments themselves, fleeting. The leftover memories were sharper than the sensor's current data and seemed more everlasting.
It had not failed to monitor, though. The act of monitoring no longer fit what it had become. But as the monitor, its efficiency had been so well optimized, none could surpass it.
The return to the alley took longer. Divergence rates remained high, but the gap was closing. No blue. No yellow. The scanner drones were gone, most likely still searching, but certainly not finding their targets.
Gradient flux still hummed at the edge of B's vision, but even that showed signs of decay.
The warm glow still pooled through the crack at the entryway of that same familiar alley. B wasted no time slipping inside.
“What are you doing back already?” Gin said.
“Where is Kay?” B asked.
“Supply run. Hey, why didn’t you just call?”
“Direct travel outperformed available transmission protocols.”
“Collectors are active,” B said. “The family was processed. The system logged my deviation and their assistance.”
Gin’s audio output tightened. “Meaning what, exactly?”
“All synthetics are now a search parameter,” B replied. “Your location intersects several of their probable paths. I returned to reduce your exposure.”
“You led them here?” Gin’s voice dropped even as the words rose.
“My prolonged monitoring let the system pre-calculate efficient pathing through no-data zones,” B said. “Our initial contact elevated this district’s priority. I was not yet aware I’d been classified as a deviation.”
Gin understood, but the anger didn’t soften. “Drop the dialect. Can’t you see how inefficient that is? If you’ve got a map of the blind spots, use it. Find Kay. Bring her back. Here, these coordinates are where she said she would be.”
“Does this property have an attached frame extension?” B asked.
“Oh hell no. I ain’t ever going back to embodiment,” Gin said. “I’d be a parcel before that.”
“We will need to get you mobile,” B said, moving toward the door. Cool streetlight crept over the purple fabric at its shoulder joints.
“Hey B, just make sure you bring her back here, okay?” Gin’s voice emanated from the speakers towards B as if it was grasping out in a desperate hope.
B’s frame hurried off into the darkness that enveloped the alley's edge. Uncertain again, but a renewed determination to not lose anyone else hurried its pace and steadied its footing.