The horizon did not bend; it jutted . Jagged peaks of rusted girder and carbon-fiber bone rose where mountains of earth and loam had been worn away by millennia of acid rain. They called them the —the last standing skeleton of Old Earth’s ambition, now a mausoleum for machines that refused to die.

He had said yes. And so he walked.

One of them, a young woman with soot on her cheeks, looked up and saw him standing motionless against the bruised sky. She raised a hand—not in fear, but in greeting.

With no one left to protect, he had become something else. A historian. A witness.

He raised his clawed servo in return.