The Breather’s Game
The camp woke with no alarm, no schedule, no system-prompted routine.
Just firewood being split. Water being boiled. A rooster crowing like the ancient world still mattered.
Vyomika stepped out into the early light.
Her joints adjusted automatically to the mountain chill, but something deeper within her didn't. She missed the cold. Not the absence of warmth, but the way skin used to shiver against it.
She walked alone past the tents, watching children chase each other between solar netting and stone. They were laughing. That startled her more than gunfire.
And then she saw him.
A boy, maybe seven. Sitting alone by the cliff, arranging stones in a pattern.
Not random.
Precise.
Geometric. Symmetrical. Familiar.
She paused.
> "Fractal nesting," she said aloud.
The boy looked up. "Huh?"
She knelt beside him, noticing the spiral he was forming—like a Fibonacci coil etched in dirt.
> "Where did you learn that?"
He shrugged. "I just see it sometimes. When I close my eyes."
He tilted his head. "You talk weird."
Vyomika smirked. "You're not the first to say that."
> "What's your name?"
> "Vyomika."
He squinted at her. "You don't look like a Vyomika."
> "I don't feel like one either."
He kept arranging stones.
> "You look like someone who got stuck halfway."
That hit harder than any drone fire.
She sat beside him. Her hand moved without command, picking up a stone and placing it in the pattern.
> "You know what a paradox is?"
He nodded. "It's when two truths fight, and neither wins."
Vyomika smiled faintly. "Yeah. That's what I am."
He was quiet for a while. Then:
> "My sister says you're metal on the inside."
Vyomika didn't flinch. "She's right."
> "Does it hurt?"
She hesitated.
> "Not the way you think."
He nodded, as if that made perfect sense. "It's okay. I had a pet beetle once. It had metal wings too. It still flew."
That made her laugh. Genuinely. It startled them both.
> "You're weird," he said.
> "Thank you."
---
Later that day, the boy gave her a single small stone from the spiral. "Keep it," he said. "For balance."
Vyomika turned the stone in her fingers. It had no signal, no serial number. Just mass. Shape. Texture.
And it made her feel more real than any implant ever had.