Day 1.
The room was quiet.
Lira stood at the center of the main lab, her eyes locked on the containment chamber where Subject 0 lay dormant. Behind the transparent glass, the pod hummed faintly, emitting a rhythmic pulse—steady, mechanical, lifeless. Nothing had changed.
A thousand thoughts circled her mind, but only one word held any weight.
"Why?"
The question wasn't directed at Subject 0. It wasn't even for herself. It was for the ghost of a man who no longer walked the world—for the withered hand that had once held hers, for the voice that had explained the stars and dissected every theory down to its marrow.
For the only person who had ever called her daughter.
The room still carried his scent. His presence. Even though a week had passed since Dr. Elian's death, Lira hadn't dared to change the way he'd left it. His papers remained untouched. His formulas and sketches still littered the walls. The chair he always sat in squeaked the same way when she walked past it. She couldn't bear to clean it. Not yet.
Not until she made it to 100%.
And so began her pilgrimage.
Day 9.
Lira sat at the main desk, hunched over stacks of notes Elian had written years ago—some even older than her creation. Her hair, usually tied in a loose braid, was wild and frizzed at the edges. Coffee stains marred the corners of his notebooks. Her eyes were rimmed with red.
She was trying to reverse-engineer a series of protein structures encoded in Subject 0's synthetic neuro-weave, but every model collapsed during simulation. She muttered Elian's old mantra aloud:
"If something breaks, it wasn't meant to be that shape in the first place."
The simulation failed again.
She didn't curse.
She didn't sigh.
She just opened a fresh sheet and began rewriting the structure from scratch.
Day 24.
Her hands trembled as she injected a micro-sample of Starduss serum into a scaffolded neuron extracted from Subject 0's growth batch. The cell twitched under the microscope, then went inert. Another failure.
She opened the observation log and recorded the event like the hundred before it. With mechanical precision, she marked the timestamp, annotated the variables, and noted the failure.
Her hand hovered over the keyboard before she whispered something—soft, unsure.
"Do you... want to live?"
It wasn't a question meant for Subject 0.
But the silence answered anyway.
Day 56.
Lira ran through Elian's lecture logs. She was cross-referencing data from Starduss-enhanced cognition matrices against her own brain patterns. A hypothesis formed—half-formed, really—that Subject 0 might require dual stimulus: logical and emotional.
"Emotion is illogical."
That's what she always believed. That's what she'd been told.
But wasn't it Elian's emotion that made him stay behind, year after year, even as the world outside crumbled?
Wasn't it emotion that made her cry the day he died?
The cell cultures reacted to certain stimuli that mimicked neurochemical signals associated with sadness.
Coincidence?
She didn't believe in coincidences anymore.
Day 100.
The anniversary of Elian's birthday.
She didn't light a candle. She didn't make a cake. But she sat in his chair and reread his final letter. Every word.
Then she added one of her own, tucking it under the panel beside Subject 0's chamber.
"You were never just data to him," she wrote. "And now... you're not just data to me."
Day 144.
The neural feedback from Subject 0 reached a new baseline.
Lira didn't smile. She just underlined the data twice and began isolating the trigger.
A subtle elevation of activity during the synthetic circadian phase.
A flutter.
Like a dream.
She stayed up all night trying to recreate the anomaly.
Day 200.
The containment chamber emitted a low hum.
Lira adjusted the stardust filtration array manually. The auto-calibrators were beginning to show errors. She suspected the systems were aging out.
She whispered to the pod.
"Don't die on me too."
It was the first time she had spoken aloud in weeks.
Day 327.
She collapsed.
Three straight days without sleep. Her body gave out in front of the console, coffee spilled across the interface. The alarms went off but she didn't stir. The lab entered emergency lockdown mode, preserving Subject 0's systems while isolating human exposure.
She awoke six hours later, dazed, dizzy, and ashamed.
Then she resumed working, slower this time.
She had learned what Elian always meant when he said, "You're not a machine, Lira. You just think you are."
Day 400.
Progress: 93.7%.
Every percentage point fought back with the fury of a thousand failures.
She was now working in full simulation mode, reprogramming the quantum lattice of Subject 0's cognition grid. The Starduss matrix had adapted, mutated even. She believed Subject 0 was learning subconsciously.
Not alive yet, but aware.
The difference was staggering.
Day 500.
Halfway.
Elian would've cracked a joke.
Lira didn't.
Instead, she played his voice logs over the speakers for the first time in months.
She worked while his voice narrated old research entries, teaching an invisible student, laughing at obscure science puns, and once—just once—singing terribly off-key while calibrating the cryo-engine.
She cried again that night.
Day 622.
Lira began dreaming.
It was new.
She dreamed of the past, of running through the facility as a child, her feet light, her laughter mechanical yet human.
She dreamed of Elian explaining constellations while she carved knife techniques into the wall.
She dreamed of Subject 0 standing before her, face obscured, voice echoing in a language she didn't understand.
When she woke, her hands were already typing new formula strings.
Day 777.
Lucky number, Elian would've said.
Lira barely acknowledged it.
She was too deep into the core recalibration sequence. The current dataflow was almost—almost—stable.
99.1%.
She began hearing phantom pulses in the lab.
Sometimes, when she wasn't looking, she felt something behind her.
Once, she turned sharply and caught a flicker on the containment glass.
Nothing was there.
Day 888.
A surge.
For exactly three seconds, Subject 0's pod flickered red. Not the artificial light. A natural light.
Like a heartbeat.
She reran the diagnostics. Every system reported no anomaly. The logs showed nothing. But she knew what she saw.
And more than that—
She felt it.
Subject 0 wasn't just reacting.
Subject 0 was reaching.
Day 999.
Lira stood before the pod, sleepless, breath shallow.
It had been nearly three years.
Her voice was raspy when she finally spoke.
"I don't know who you are. Or what you'll become. But I know this... You are the last gift he left behind. And I won't let you fade."
She rested her hand on the pod's glass.
Inside, the silhouette remained still.
But this time…
She saw the faintest twitch in its left hand.
No more than a reflex. But enough to stop her breath.
Enough to make her believe.
Day 1298.
Progress: 99.8%.
Still incomplete.
Still not awake.
But alive.
Just barely.
The hum of the chamber carried a rhythm now. Not a machine's repetition—but a subtle, living pulse. Like a heartbeat in deep sleep. Like a child before waking. Like the dawn, waiting behind a heavy horizon.
Lira didn't celebrate.
She just opened a new page in the system logs, titled it "Day One," and began typing.
Not as an experiment.
But as someone preparing to meet another soul.