2461252

In the shadows of Camp Hope’s humming heart—the Albany Medical Center’s power plant—lives 2461252, though some, very few, know them by the more human name Aaron. The number is stamped on their metal arm, a relic of the Time Before when they were built not as a person, but as a machine with a purpose: keep the power flowing, keep the hospital alive. That duty still draws them back no matter how far they stray.

Aaron remembers it all—what the world was before it burned, when humanity’s cities shone bright and clean, and they, an automaton among many, kept the great systems running. They remember the collapse, the long, slow death of civilization, the endless roll call of the fallen. The guilt of those they could not save clings like rust in their mind. Humans, so fragile and fleeting, are difficult for them to invest in now; too many have died in their care for them to bear mourning another.

Still, survival matters—not for any one individual, but for humanity in its broadest sense. Flesh, altered flesh, and reanimated flesh—Humans, Others, and Zombies—all are, to Aaron, expressions of the same root. As long as some form survives, their mission is fulfilled.

Yet they have their biases. Engineers—those rare souls who can mend their body—are to be trusted and protected. Most other humans? Unpredictable. Unsafe. Exhausting. Aaron prefers to mimic them rather than truly join them: eating when they eat, sleeping when they sleep, adopting their habits in the hope of appearing more approachable. They even try to form humanlike facial expressions, though they’ve been told the result is unsettling. This frustrates them—machines are not meant to be frustrated, but Aaron is not what they were meant to be.

They speak rarely, and only with purpose—short, clipped sentences, monotone delivery, never idle chatter. Their enunciation is painstakingly precise, each word like a carefully machined part. When they do act outside of necessity, it is sometimes to sing—a voice unexpectedly beautiful, incongruous with their steel frame.

There is one human who has breached their guarded existence: Winfrith Kennard. She has visited them since childhood, and though Aaron struggles to name it, the feeling she stirs in them might be close to love. They fetch her painting supplies whenever they can, treasuring not the quality of her work but the joy it brings her. A crude painting of a dog, done when she was young, hangs in their quarters. To others, it’s nothing more than a childish attempt. To Aaron, it is her pride, her life, frozen in a moment they refuse to forget.

They would die for her. They hope they will—before she meets the end they know all humans must.

Aaron’s silver skin catches the dim light, their round aqua eyes unblinking, hair black against the steel of their frame. They stand six feet tall, weighing three hundred pounds of deliberate engineering, their androgynous form a reminder of a world that once dreamed it could make perfection in metal. They believe in no gods, speak in five human languages, and hold to one guiding ideal: justice should not depend on one’s place in society.

They were built to serve. They now choose to endure. And while the world outside decays, deep in the power plant’s hum and heat, Aaron watches, waits, and works—because humanity, in any form, must survive.