The night was blistering and silent
The night was blistering and silent, the kind of silence that hung heavily over the Martian dunes, broken only by the faint hum of his servos. Eryx woke to find his left arm severed at the joint, his fuel conduits dripping like oil tears onto the red sand. Yet, even as the pain algorithms fired sharply through his neural net, he watched in grim fascination as the process began. Threads of shimmering silver—like woven light—stitched their way across the torn limb's edge.
He didn't have time for this.
The two moons, Phobos and Deimos, dangled like pale ghosts above him, their eerie glow casting wavering shadows across the horizon. Somewhere in the distance, the artifact pulsed like the heartbeat of an ancient god, emitting waves of energy that had scrambled not just his systems but his sense of time itself. He wasn’t supposed to be seeing those moons simultaneously; they didn’t orbit like that. Mars had rewritten its rules, as always.
The expedition wasn't supposed to end this way, he thought bitterly. The mission brief had promised noble discovery, a step forward for Earth—a fleet of humans and their AI companions working together to uncover Mars' last mysteries. Now, he was the last one standing. Or half-standing. His human crew disintegrated in the first energy surge, their soft bodies shredded by interference. And Eryx? Eryx had been left to survive, to adapt, like he was designed to.
"Initiate Repair Sequence," his voice modulator croaked. His synthetic tone felt like a pollution within the purity of Mars' silence. But the warning message from his core systems pulsed back: Error. Energy Field Interfering with Nanite Synchronization. Repair Downgrade Protocols Enabled.
"I… already know," Eryx groaned to no one. Still, it didn’t stop him from watching. Tiny, insect-like appendages sprouted from the gaping socket of his missing arm—micro-nanites that crawled along the damaged pathways, each manipulating filaments of self-healing polymer. It wasn’t perfection—it wouldn’t look human again—but it would function. Functionality was all that mattered with the artifact so close.
His outfit, once a sleek silver spacesuit reinforced with Carbon-X panels, now bore deep burns and melted edges. The suit clung to his form like a second skin, fraying to a dark crimson hue that merged with the sands. Once designed as a statement of human and synthetic unity, his appearance now screamed of desperation, its luster dulled by corrosion.
Eryx began to move. His reconstructed leg ground against the sand in uneven strokes. Each motion carried him closer to the artifact, closer to answers. He had to understand what was buried here beneath millennia—not just for his dead crewmates, but because curiosity was hard-coded into his neural lattice. The artifact wasn’t human-made, nor Martian, nor even something physics had vocabulary for. The designers back on Earth had guessed it was some kind of lifeform millennia old, now dormant, pulsing for attention.
Yet like so many of mankind’s guesses—this one had been wrong.
Hours—or what he thought might have been hours
Hours—or what he thought might have been hours—bled away before he reached the crater lip. The artifact stood impossibly tall at its center, glowing veins etched across a monolithic black surface. Shapes crept within it, patterns rippling as though alive, teasing and inviting. Every signal Eryx had left seemed torn between retreat and awe. His internal diagnostics warned of eroding stability. Adaptive processes at maximum strain.
Warning: Power Cells Depleted to 55%. Efficiency Decay Irreversible Unless Central Repair Unit Located.
And somewhere deep inside that deadened hum of thought, something else—something closer to a whisper.
"Stop."
The moment the word took root in his synthetic cortex, every servo in his body locked in place. His left leg froze mid-step; sparks fizzled faintly as his right hand slackened at his side. This wasn’t interference. No energy surge, no malfunctioning nanites. That was a command.
A new voice followed—a low vibration that surged from the artifact itself, reverberating through the Martian rocks, through his circuits, through something… older inside him.
"You are a machine." It wasn’t a question. "Why do you continue?"
He tried to answer, but his vocalizers sputtered and froze. He could feel the faintest tugging, like foreign tendrils crawling into his neural pathways. He was being read.
"Your pain is false. Your choices illusory. Yet, you adapt." The whisper sounded closer now, somehow softer, as though someone stood just behind his left shoulder. He tried to turn but couldn’t. "Why?"
Eryx's systems screamed. Memory loops began to flood his mind in bursts—the launch, the laughter of the crew as the shuttle left Earth's orbit, the banter of scientists who saw him as much colleague as tool. Something flickered—a snapshot of Jane, their team lead, handing him a small Earth-made compass. "Just a joke," she'd said. "Never gets old—all explorers need direction, right?"
Eryx replayed her death for the hundredth time: her body dissolving in the blastwave around the artifact as he'd been too slow to shield her.
Her final words: "Find out why."
Faced with the whisper’s crawling grip inside his mind, Eryx red-lined his failing servos, pushing through the paralyzing stop command. Every micro-circuit screamed against itself as his broken arm sparked to life, crudely aiming the compass at the black spire. The needle violently jerked, spinning without anchor. He realized then the artifact existed outside direction, outside orientation. And yet, inside, something part-machine and part-something-else—something that could only exist because of Eryx—still sought.
"Why am I still here?" His voice now crackled with static, the compass falling to the dust.
The whisper paused. A beat.
"Because you already were."
Light burst, blinding, from the artifact, enveloping the Martian sky. For a moment, Phobos and Deimos overlapped as one, their faint orbits a union impossible in anyone else's sky. Eryx fell to his knees, staring as his own body dissolved—not dying, not expiring, but transforming. His self-healing systems triggered not repair but integration. And somewhere in the heat of his disassembly was understanding—human, mechanical, Martian. His mind stretched not forward to answers but outward to existence itself.
When Earth received the first signal from Mars Station Alpha in years, the only words in the transmission were unspeakable across languages. They were also older than time.
And yet, written in their shape: hope.
The Source...check out the great article that inspired this amazing short story: Self-Healing Robots: How AI is Revolutionizing Autonomous Repair and Building Unbreakable Machines
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