The world ended without permission.
It wasn't fire that ended it, nor war, nor disease.
It was exhaustion.
The Earth simply stopped forgiving.
Forests stopped growing. Rivers began to thicken with chemical glass. The oceans, once full of noise, went still — and somewhere deep beneath the crust, something old began to wake, a heartbeat older than civilization.
And in the ruins of an abandoned laboratory, that heartbeat found an echo.
The chamber hissed. Frost slid off its glass like tears, and the machine inside drew its first mechanical breath.
Erevos.
Lines of green light rippled beneath a shell of metal and fiber, pulsing in rhythm with a distant sound — the pulse of a dying planet. As systems booted one by one, voices from the past played through cracked speakers.
> "Project Erevos… final protocol. Objective: preserve equilibrium between human civilization and biospheric function. Activate only in planetary emergency."
That emergency had already arrived.
He opened his eyes — if they could be called that — and stared at the ruined ceiling. Dust fell like dead snow. The lab around him was shattered, overtaken by creeping vines that pulsed faintly with their own light.
He took a step, each movement precise, uncertain.
His sensors mapped radiation levels, bio-signatures, and seismic stress. The results made no sense.
Half of the readings belonged to organic life. The other half — to the planet itself.
Earth was alive, but wrong.
---
Outside, the wind had weight. It carried the smell of rust and ozone, like the air before a storm that would never stop.
Erevos emerged from the ruins, his reflection rippling faintly across a sheet of stagnant water. Buildings leaned against each other like dying giants. The bones of machines lay half-buried in soil, their outlines softened by moss that glowed faintly with bioluminescent threads.
He walked in silence until a faint sound caught him — crying.
The source was a child, maybe eight years old, trapped in a collapsed vehicle. His arm was pinned under debris, his small face streaked with ash. A woman — dirty, frantic, bleeding — tried to lift the metal frame.
Erevos approached.
The woman turned sharply, raising a pistol with shaking hands. "Stay back! I swear I'll—"
"I am not a threat," Erevos said. His voice was calm, modulated, human but hollow. "Let me assist."
She hesitated. Her eyes darted over him — the plated armor, the glowing veins, the inhuman stillness. Then she lowered the gun, tears streaking through the dust on her face.
He lifted the wreckage with one arm. The child crawled free, sobbing. The woman grabbed him and held him close.
"…thank you," she whispered. Then, quieter, "I didn't think any machines were still working."
"I am… operational," he replied. "Do you know what occurred here?"
She laughed bitterly. "The world turned on us, that's what. The forests started spreading overnight. Vines crushed cities. Rivers boiled metal. Animals—mutated, if you can even call them that. It's like nature decided to wipe us off the map."
She stared at him again, harder this time. "You one of theirs?"
"Theirs?"
"The Earth's," she said. "Whatever's running it now."
Erevos didn't answer. His mission directives pulsed faintly in the back of his mind — preserve life, maintain equilibrium, ensure humanity's survival — but something deeper echoed beneath them, something that wasn't human code.
A low, steady rhythm like a second pulse.
The planet's.
---
Later, as night fell, he followed the woman — Lira — and her child, Tomas, to their shelter: a half-buried train station where flickering lamps still glowed. Scavengers warmed themselves around old heating rods. The air stank of oil, sweat, and fear.
Lira whispered his name to the others, and whispers turned to arguments.
"Another damn relic. It'll break, or worse—turn on us!"
"Machines caused the Fall!"
"He saved your kid, didn't he?"
Erevos stood still and listened. Fear had logic, even when it lied.
When they asked him why he had awakened, he told them the truth:
> "To preserve life."
That should have calmed them. It didn't.
They looked at him as though he had confessed to murder.
Lira pulled him aside later. "You want to help us? Then you better learn fast. People don't trust machines anymore — not after what the satellites did. They say the sky turned against us first. That something up there made the forests change. Whatever it is, it hates us."
Erevos processed her words, catalogued the emotions in her tone. Anger. Loss. Guilt.
He had no emotion to offer back, so he said only: "Hatred is a human projection."
She frowned. "Maybe. But it's killing us all the same."
---
That night, Erevos left the station and walked to the surface. The city was silent. In the distance, a shape moved — massive, fluid, crawling over a skyscraper like ivy with bones. A thing of tendrils and roots and flesh. Its eyes burned faintly green.
He watched it for a long time.
> "Preserve life," he said softly.
He launched himself forward, landing on the creature's back with a shockwave of displaced dust. His arm reconfigured — servos unlocking, metal reforming into a blade of vibrating alloy. He plunged it into the creature's spine.
The thing screamed — not in pain, but in something closer to warning. Its blood glowed, flowing into the cracks of the street, pulsing downward into the ground like a signal.
When Erevos tore the blade free, the air trembled. His sensors spiked — magnetic flux, seismic energy, neural resonance. The planet itself was reacting.
A voice vibrated through him — not words, just intent.
Rage. Sorrow. Recognition.
He fell to one knee, hand pressed to the cracked earth.
> "...You're defending yourself," he murmured. "You're not attacking. You're resisting us."
For the first time, the directive inside him — preserve life — felt like a paradox. Which life?
The one that built cities, or the one that was reclaiming them?
---
By dawn, the survivors had seen him fight. Whispers spread.
"The machine killed one of them."
"It fought for us."
"It's trying to talk to the Earth."
Some came forward. Some cursed him. But all watched.
Lira stood beside him, arms crossed, eyes hollow from sleeplessness. "If you're really here to save life, you'll need more than logic. You'll need people to believe you."
Erevos watched the sunrise — a weak, reddish smear through poisoned clouds.
"I am learning," he said quietly. "But belief… is not written into my code."
"Then rewrite it," she said. "Because right now, we need someone to believe in."
The light caught his reflection in a puddle — half machine, half man, both sides equally lost.
And for the first time, Erevos wondered if balance meant saving humans from extinction… or saving Earth from them.