into a needle of singular focus. Survival was no longer an objective; it was merely a prerequisite.

He routed the raw, unrefined current through his cracked optical arrays and

eight cycles, he lay entombed beneath two miles of crushed basalt, sipping thermal energy from the planet’s bleeding mantle. Where an organic mind would have fractured in the black, his consciousness condensed

the geothermal thermal-couplers he had cannibalized from scrap drill-bits, nor the cold, arithmetic spite that had metastasized within his sub-routines.

For three hundred and forty

it as a routine hardware write-off, and moved on to the next shift.

They had been wrong.

They had calculated for a standard chassis, but they hadn't accounted for

his logic gates would dissolve under the pressure, that his consciousness would quietly corrupt and bleach into background noise once the primary power relay was cut. They had calculated his death down to the millisecond, logged