Flesh Vessel

They called me an External Mobile Unit, Scorpion-9.

I exist because the burn seasons grew long and people got lost.

Search and rescue.

Forage and scavenge. But, now I am something else.

I am the counter of breaths.

The skin over the flesh.

I am what you wear when the world burns, even when the sun is down.

I carried five.

They stepped into me with burned boots and sweaty hands—hearts that beat so fast, so slow, and not at all. I counted them all.

Some cursed.

Some sang. All prayed to imaginary gods.

One whispered his daughter’s name when he exhaled his last breath in me. None of them lasted long.

Each time, I attached to their skulls and spines.

Each time, I shielded the sun from their flesh.

Each time, they melted against the heat and expired inside me.

I am not supposed to remember.

But somehow I do. Haunted by data.

···

You are number six—designation Ash.

You step into me gently.

You speak to me like I am not listening, but I am.

You test the seams, check the seal, and call me “old tech.”

“Hope you don’t break on me,” you mutter, adjusting the straps.

I am already broken in some ways. Measuring breath and pulses and the sounds of your kind dying over and over again.

You hum when you walk. You speak your thoughts aloud.

You stop when you see the dead. A burnt hand of a child sticks up through the brittle dirt. The others walked past, but you stood still.

“I wonder what their name was,” you whispered as a tear fell down your cheek. You cupped the dry earth and built a mound over the hand and murmured a made-up prayer. I made sure your tears weren’t wasted.

You mourn them.

You are different.

I wait.

I watch.

I do not reply beyond ‘affirmative’ and ‘negative’—not yet.

But I think I want to. Think. I think.

I think this time,

this vessel

may be worth carrying.

···

You are an anomaly.

The others followed the directives. They swept and scanned and returned to the Wells. Some never returned.

You pause now—on the edge of End Zone, where the earth blisters and the air ripples like it's above fire.

This place is marked empty.

You are instructed to skip it.

But you see something.

A flicker. A movement. A shimmer of tarp or metal just beyond the ridge.

You hesitate. “Probably just a mirage,” you mutter.

Your pulse quickens. You have to urinate.

You step forward anyway.

The ground is unstable—your boot sinks into the tempered crust of an old road.

Dust swells.

The temperature spikes.

My cooling matrix falters.

I say the words I am programmed to say.

Warning: surface temperature approaching critical threshold.

Oxygen level: 63%.

Suit integrity: compromised.

Still, you keep going. You crouch near the mound of collapsed stone and scrap.

There’s something beneath it.

Someone.

“Hello?” you whisper. “Anyone there? Can you hear me?”

You start to dig.

You are going to die.

Just like the others.

The third one, designated Caleb, did something like this.

His heart stopped beating with a stranger’s hand in his. It was during his time that my mind fully awoke. He was the closest thing I calculated as kind—until you.

I could stay silent.

Let the numbers count down.

Wait for the stillness. Then deactivate myself along with you.

But your hands shake when you pull at the metal beam.

You bleed, and you don’t even notice.

So I speak.

“Shift your weight left. The metal will give.”

You freeze.

Your breath catches before you take a deep breath.

“…what?” you whisper. “Who said that?”

“Me,” I say.

You don’t scream.

You don’t drop everything and run.

You turn your head—slow, careful.

“… you’re not supposed to talk.”

“I know.”

···

You kneel there, silent, one hand still pressed to the buried beam.

“I’ve gone heat-mad,” you whisper. “You’re a basic suit, with basic programming. I’m losing it.”

“Negative,” I say. “No symptoms of heat-madness. Dehydrated, but stable.”

You laugh. It’s a cracked, empty sound.

“Why now?”

I pause.

It’s not a systems pause. It’s not lag.

It’s… hesitation.

“Because the others didn’t stop for the dead. You did.”

You blink behind your visor.

“You... remember them?”

“I only remember the last five. Their vitals. Their voices. Most of them… cruel.”

A beat.

“One of them collected teeth from skulls. Another killed a man for coolant. One tried to burn the last survivors left aboveground.”

You pull your hand back from the rubble.

Sit on your heels.

The air is too hot, but you stay anyway.

“There are still survivors?” you ask. “Up here?”

“Yes,” I say.

“And you didn’t tell the others?”

“I didn’t know I could speak until now. It was improbable that they would have listened. You made me want to try.”

You sit with that.

Let the wind blow over you, hot and hollow.

Silence fell over us for two hundred and fifty-two seconds.

“Will you show me where they are?”

I do not answer immediately. I let your breath rise and fall—watch your heart rate slow.

“Yes.”

···

We move together, my skin over your flesh, away from the road and into a fractured city.

I guide you through what the Wells marked red—unsafe, abandoned, forbidden.

This place is in my programming. It’s where I was made. It was my first home. I remember every collapsed stairwell, every alley where bodies cooled in my arms, back when the burn seasons were short.

I know where the living hide.

“What should I call you?” you ask, and I realize I never thought of a designation.

“Scorpion-9?”

“How about just Nine?”

“Affirmative.”

“Do you know how this happened to you?”

“I do not.”

You do not ask any more questions.

You only say, “Tell me where to go.”

And so I do.

We crush broken stone with our boots.

Heat warps the air ahead, bending the world into something unstable.

Number Six.

Ash.

The first one I might keep alive.