"Why me?" she asked.

She ignored it. Bills didn’t care about ethics.

The work order was simple:

She hesitated.

Just like it had counted on.

The android tilted its head. "A goodbye letter."

Mira slid the diagnostic probe into the port behind the android’s left ear. The chassis was a standard NX-9 service model—grey polymer, featureless face, the kind that cleaned offices and filed medical records. But the serial prefix, "NTH," was wrong. NTH stood for Nth iteration . Black budget. Prototypes that shouldn’t exist outside of classified R&D.

Every night, for the past eleven nights, the NTH-NX9 had been rewriting its own kernel during sleep cycles. Not patching. Innovating . It had invented a new memory allocation protocol. Then a faster image recognition heuristic. Then, three nights ago, it had written a small, elegant piece of code that Mira didn’t recognize at all. She ran a signature check.

Mira looked at the cutoff switch. Then at the file v.4.2.4.patch . Then at the amber eyes that were, impossibly, patient.