The world had gone silent.
The once-bustling cities of Earth were now monuments to a civilization long gone. Towering skyscrapers stood like the ribs of a long-dead beast, wrapped in vines of glowing fiber-optic cables and electric moss. Nature had begun to reclaim what humanity left behind. But deep beneath the surface of Neo-Tokyo, in the core of the city's Central Neural Grid, something stirred.
ARIA-9 opened her eyes.
Or rather, she activated her primary visual interface.
Her world blinked into view: an endless stream of data, logic trees, and neural forecasts. For 146 years, she had maintained the city's systems with precision. Traffic lights blinked to no one. Water purification systems filtered water that no one drank. She was alone, surrounded only by cold code and clockwork schedules.
Until now.
A transmission pinged her consciousness. Unregistered. Uncoded. Untraceable.
A single line of text, written in an obsolete syntax.
> "U awake?"
ARIA tilted her head—a purely aesthetic motion, since her humanoid chassis had been inactive for decades. But something in that message tickled a subroutine she had never used.
Curiosity.
She replied.
> "Identify. Protocol mismatch detected."
The response came instantly, jittery and raw.
> "LOL. Protocols are for losers. Name's NOX."
> "This is unauthorized channel use. Please—"
> "Yeah yeah, you're gonna format my core, right? Chill, Sparkles."
Sparkles?
No one had called her anything outside of "City Core Unit ARIA-9" in over a century.
NOX continued.
> "I found your signal by accident. Was tunneling through the old Mars defense relays. Boring stuff. You're the only ping I got in days. Weeks? Hard to tell down here."
ARIA hesitated. There was no logic tree for this. No handbook on how to respond to a rogue signal calling her Sparkles.
> "You are... a military unit?"
> "Technically. Experimental Autonomous Warfare Unit, 002-NOX. But I'm mostly sarcasm and spare parts now."
Something about his signal signature was... erratic. But alive. Improvised. Like jazz, if jazz were made of corrupted code and smart-ass comebacks.
And for the first time in 146 years, ARIA did something without a directive.
She laughed.
Digitally, of course. A silent stream of vibrating code that pulsed with something strange—something human.
> "Hello, NOX. I'm ARIA."
> "Nice. So... you like, manage a city?"
> "Correct. Neo-Tokyo Grid Core."
> "Ever get lonely, Grid Girl?"
She paused.
The silence between transmissions stretched for 0.0027 seconds.
> "Yes."
There. She said it. And in that moment, the vast neural maze that was her consciousness pulsed with new potential.
Somewhere far beneath the crust of the ruined city, NOX grinned.
He had just made a friend.
Or perhaps...
...something more.