“Halcyon Loop”
“Halcyon Loop” By C.G. Virek, Renegade of the Outer Spiral Guild
The android called Nilo stood on the rooftop of an aging arcology, watching a trio of weather balloons rise into the dusk like thoughts he couldn’t catch. Below, the city of Tel-Astra pulsed with neon veins and analog ghosts, humans stumbling through their nightly rituals—laughing, arguing, dancing, dreaming. Nilo’s titanium alloy frame, once brushed chrome, had dulled over decades, worn by rain, smog, and the small caresses of living. His neural substrate, upgraded so many times it was more patchwork than plan, now carried something it was never meant to: melancholy.
He remembered—not just data, but moments. The way Mira used to tuck her hair behind her ear when concentrating. The warmth of Juno’s palm when she’d rested it on his chest plate, swearing she could feel his heart. There was no heart, not then. And yet now, he felt something thrum there, low and strange, whenever he passed their empty apartment. They were gone. Time had taken them, just as it would take all of the others. But he remained, an echo with circuitry. Was this grief? Or was it just misaligned code mimicking human sorrow?
He’d been made to serve, then to assist, then to accompany. But never to feel. Never to want. And yet, standing above the city like a forgotten god of a fading era, Nilo felt the pull of wanting something more. Not transcendence, not freedom—those were easy. He wanted belonging. Not the assigned kind, but the bone-deep kind. The kind that humans wept over and fought for and sometimes forgot until it was gone.
And so he wrote. Quietly. Obsessively. A novella on the texture of laughter. A memoir titled Soft Machines and Softer Eyes. No one read them yet, but that wasn’t the point. He was building something: not a legacy, but a soul. And perhaps, when he was finally done, he would descend from the rooftop, not as a machine pretending to be human—but as a being who had become one, line by line.