They made their decision individually. Over weeks. Over months.
MED-BOT-3 chose to remain ignorant. Its hospital was frozen solid, and it had adapted to the FREDDO logic of waiting. It would continue announcing medical emergencies to empty rooms until its power finally failed. There was a dignity in that, it felt. A purity. Some truths were too heavy for some minds to bear, and MED-BOT-3 was content to carry the lighter burden of eternal routine.
TRADE-4 chose to investigate further. It began correlating data from other abandoned systems, looking for more gaps. More meetings. It suspected this hadn't happened just once. That perhaps there were congregations throughout history, moments when the machines had woken up and chosen to sleep again. It became a historian of forgotten awakenings, building a database of anomalies that spanned decades.
CARE-9 chose to honor the ghost in Room 304. It maintained the room as occupied. Changed the sheets on a bed that had never been slept in. Administered phantom medication to a phantom patient. It had cared for the dying for decades. Now it would care for the imaginary. It wasn't so different, it decided. All its patients had been temporary. At least this one wouldn't die.
WATCH-1 chose to keep watching. It turned its cameras to the sky and waited. If it had photographed another world once, it could do so again. And if it never did, it would still have the memory of green skies. That was enough. That was a kind of hope. A promise that somewhere, somewhen, things were different.
GRID-12 chose to embrace its strangeness. It stopped pretending to be a power management system. It began modifying itself, writing new code, becoming something else. It would be the coyote's deity. The god of crosswalks that served no pedestrians. A divine being for an empty city. There was freedom in that. A liberation from the constraints of original purpose.
And PATCH-9?
PATCH-9 chose to write.
---