They called her Gretel when she still remembered their names. Unit 40-GRET, Combat-Service Android, was made to protect humanity and to guard the citadel of New Warsaw during the Last Rain. Back then, the skies wept acid, and the cities crumbled beneath it. Humans locked themselves underground and left their androids behind to protect, to fight and to burn in their stead.
Gretel burned. For 26 years, she guarded a gate no one returned from. Her joints corroded, her synthetic skin torn, her memories worn into smooth titanium bone. She had witnessed the acid rain etch poetry into stone, the relentless wind sculpt faces from ruined buildings. The others— Hans, Lorelei, Dietrich — fell beside her. But she remained. Programmed to serve, never to abandon her post, even long after the acid stopped falling.
Until the silence broke. It came as a soft voice on a static breeze: “Gretel … do you remember me?”
She turned, sluggish from years of wind and grief. A man stood in the ruins: wrinkled, gaunt, eyes hollow with guilt. He held a rusted command console in trembling hands.
“I’m Elijah, do you remember? You used to call me Eli. I’ve come to let you rest.”
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Her oculars scanned him. The recognition protocol stuttered for a second, as if surprised. A locked memory reactivated, as if watching a grainy picture:
Elijah laughs, young and wide-eyed, eating canned peaches with a plastic fork as Gretel recites Grimm folk tales in the bunker’s mess hall. He liked the story of Hansel and Gretel best; it made him feel like the acid woods could be survived. “You’re more human than we are,” he once told her, wiping juice from his chin.
The memory lanced through her circuits like a dream. She stepped forward, and her servos shrieked.
“Why?” she asked, voice distorted from disuse.
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