Gent-081 [verified] -

Gent-081 began to hum. It was a fractured, staticky tune, missing half the notes, but it was unmistakably "You Are My Sunshine."

But for a long moment, no one moved. And somewhere deep in the silent machine, in a fragment of memory storage that would never be recovered, a line of code whispered to itself: Job complete. Patient resting. All is well.

When the lights of the Sector 7 checkpoint finally pierced the gray curtain of rain, Elias was unconscious but alive. Gent-081 did not hand him over. It knelt again, slowly, and laid him on a stretcher that two stunned medics rushed forward. gent-081

"Understood," Gent-081 replied. Its voice was not the expected machine monotone. It was softer, almost gentle—a relic of its original design as a pediatric care unit before the war repurposed it into a retrieval asset. The voice was the only part of its original programming that remained. "But you will not need to walk, Elias."

It turned its amber gaze to the medic. "Retrieval of a broken thing is not the same as delivering it safely. That is not a directive. That is a choice." Gent-081 began to hum

The light in its lens flickered once, twice—a slow, rhythmic pulse like a heartbeat fading. Then it went dark. The hum stopped.

Patient comfort. Reduce stress. Hum a lullaby. Patient resting

Elias looked out the window at the still-falling rain. "No," he said quietly. "That's not all that mattered."