Pushed to the brink of desperation, the Council had finally sanctioned Jackson’s solution, willing to take a gamble on his precise mind and the high-stakes gamble of his invention. Even Councillor Shaw had remained silent, much to Jackson’s surprise. Perhaps she had finally recognized the abyss facing all of them, or maybe she was simply allowing Jackson enough rope to hang himself should the invention fail. Regardless of the motive, Shaw’s silence made all the difference. Without friction, Jackson was allowed to cut off prying eyes and work in total isolation to maintain absolute control of his project until its activation. There could be no room for error.

Jackson’s creation—visible to all as a curved lattice of polished panels and cables that snaked into the floor like roots burrowing deep into the planet’s marrow— sat like a featureless domino in the center of the chamber, wrought from stolen glass, parts and alloys. The culmination of three years, Jackson had painstakingly laboured over the project, driven by a singular goal: to build a machine capable of fixing the structural failings sown by his ancestors.

  Standing at the edge of the central chamber, Jackson watched the flickering lights overhead, each pulse of faltering electricity a symptom of the structure’s failing heart. As the lungs of the generators choked on their last fumes, a child’s cough rang out in the distance.  

The Council waited apprehensively behind the inventor, their faces pale and sharp in the dim glow. Jackson was indifferent to the internal divisions of the Council or the wider colony, holding no regard for the praise or criticism directed at his work. He was attempting to create mankind’s miracle. 

It had not been an easy path.

Crops had failed months ago. Hydroponic trays lay barren, their roots shrivelled in the corpse of dried soil. Ration lines stretched like funeral processions through the tunnels, their shadows crawling along rusted walls like starving ghosts. 

  Jackson’s hands trembled as they gripped the railing. He had promised the Council—the entire underground colony— nothing short of a miracle. He had promised the sky.

The word felt obscene in his mouth. Sky. A thing of myths and bedtime stories, a blue infinity that no one here had ever seen. Memories of it had unravelled like rotting threads, the concept lost in the engulfing darkness. Generations had lived and died under rock and steel of the colony, their world a coffin carved into the planet’s core. The surface was poison, they were told. A wasteland of ash and storms. To speak of it as anything beautiful was madness.

The sharks from the Council circled, waiting for the slightest reason to second-guess their decision and shut the project down. It had nearly happened when it was discovered that Jackson had removed the circuit board from the heating system in Sector 1, dropping temperature to freezing. Thankfully Jackson not only managed to rectify the situation within hours, but was able to successfully convince the chair it was sabotage from a disgruntled pipesmith. Blurring black and white ethical lines to shades of grey had become second nature to Jackson now, but he was confident that the ends justified the means.

He stood in silent admiration before his achievement. This was it, at long last.

The Sky Machine.

The directives for the machine were simple: Preserve life. Calculate efficiencies. Find solutions his people had repeatedly failed to grasp for their dying underground home. The colony’s infrastructure had devolved into a ruin of rusted conduits and the very bones of the underground sanctuary were surrendering to decay with critical systems failing in a slow collapse that the survivors could no longer ignore. The Sky Machine was designed to be the colony’s ultimate cognitive engine—a centralized intelligence capable of processing the vast, interconnected variables of a failing ecosystem that had become too complex for human minds to manage. By optimizing what was left, the goal was to bring humanity back from extinction. 

Jackson told himself it was altruism, a way of turning his talents to something positive in a world watching its horizon fold into darkness. Though, a fact even he refused to acknowledge, Jackson had built the Sky Machine so that when the last story of humanity was written, the final chapter would bear his name. Not because he loved humanity, but because he feared being forgotten by it.

The grand architect stepped forward, boots ringing against steel, the weight of expectation causing each movement to become heavier. Hundreds of gaunt, hollow-eyes, sunken into pits of pale skin starred up from the levels below like ghosts at Jackson, awaiting resurrection. The crowd stirred, a ripple of whispers breaking the silence, a quiet maelstrom of excitement and fear. The people had gathered to have front row seats to their salvation.

 Jackson gripped the activation lever. The metal coldness of the handle bit into his flesh.

If this fails, he thought, we die in the dark… I die in the dark. I have staked everything on this. If it fails then I lose it all, my power, my influence, my chance to be revered. This has to work, I will make it work. Jackson had sheltered behind his work, but now he was exposed. Only success would save him from the rage bubbling up in those around him if he failed to deliver.

Jackson’s muscles shook as he pulled the lever down.

The machine shuddered.

 A deep, resonant growl of a beast awoken filled the chamber, vibrating through bone and stone. Panels flared with cascading light—cold at first, sterile white beams stabbing eyes. Then it warmed, blooming into gold, spilling across the steel walls like liquid fire.

Gasps rippled through the throng. Someone sobbed. Others fell to their knees, arms raised in a desperate, wordless plea.

Jackson followed their gaze upwards to see the ceiling’s shadows dissolve. Black steel melted into a dome of shimmering blue. Clouds formed and swirled, impossibly soft, tinged with crimson. A sun ignited—artificial, but radiant—casting long shadows across the stunned congregation below. 

Jackson had expected his machine’s first act to be a clinical overhaul of the choking oxygen recyclers or water filtration systems. Instead, the chamber was suddenly flooded with a brilliant, artificial radiance as The Sky Machine projected a blindingly realistic simulation of the sun. By rerouting massive wattage from the heavy industrial forges into the full-spectrum lighting grid and syncing it with thermal emitters—a brilliant exercise Jackson couldn’t fully comprehend—the machine transformed the damp chill of the cavern into a cathedral of warmth.

Jackson stood frozen in confusion. He had built a problem-solver, not a poet, and seeing precious energy diverted from life support to a mere visual display felt like a catastrophic error. However, as the golden light touched the pale, upturned faces of the onlookers, the oppressive silence of the chamber was shattered. 

Crowds erupted in a roar of ecstatic cheering, a sound of pure, unfiltered joy that hadn’t been heard in the colony for generations. Watching the people weep and embrace under the artificial glow, Jackson’s skepticism vanished. He realized the machine hadn’t made a mistake—it had protected him. It had secured his safety by turning a skeptical populace into a roaring crowd.

Jackson watched in pure disbelief as the machine did far more than provide warmth. By rerouting complex systems, it had surpassed calculations around mechanical-efficiencies to offer the colony something far more powerful… 

Hope.

For the first time in decades, hope was visible in the eyes of all present. The air grew still and reverent, until a voice pierced the silence.

“H…ello?”

A quiet, nervous voice juxtaposed the celebrations, cutting through it with uncomfortable sharpness. Jackson stiffened. The crowd, caught too much in the embrace of rapture, failed to notice the mounting tension amongst its leaders.

“H…ello?”

Jackson froze. 

While gentle and childlike the words were not sounds, but tones vibrating in his skull. If it was not for the bewilderment of the nearby members of the Council, Jackson would have sworn the long hours, and exhaustion had finally taken its toll on his psyche.

Eventually, cautiously, Jackson whispered…”Who’s there?”

Silence stretched for an eternity, until eventually a small and timid voice echoed through Jackson’s mind

“I…I don’t know. Am I…the Sky?”

Jackson had originally envisioned his creation as a central intelligence stitched together from scavenged machines and stolen components to solve the colony’s practical failures… but by merging these disparate systems into a single, cohesive mind, he quietly realized he had inadvertently created something else.

“Are you my…maker?”

The question hit with unexpected force: in his attempt to preserve life, had he accidentally birthed a new one? Jackson’s mind raced, searching for the source of this unplanned consciousness. Was it a glitch in his diagnostic software, or a feedback loop triggered by a sudden voltage spike that fused his subsystems into a sentient spark? Perhaps his electrical necromancy had reanimated a dormant artificial intelligence patch buried within the scavenged machines. For the first time, Jackson was paralyzed by a bitter wave of confusion and uncertainty.

Through dried lips, Jackson managed to respond “Yes, I suppose I am”

A warm light shimmered instantly across the polished interface, rippling like the first breath of a newly conscious child‑machine. The display pulsed with something unmistakably alive. Jackson felt a surge of energy radiate outward, and with it came an unexpected sensation—an echo of childish excitement that sent a shiver crawling up his spine.

Jackson finally asked the question rising in his mind “Why the sun?”

The machine’s voice was a soft, resonant hum, carrying the hesitant pride of a child presenting a first drawing. 

“They looked… afraid of the dark”.

Jackson looked back at the shimmering rafters of the colony as the artificial sun blinked and swirled in its theatrical presentation. In profound, quiet awe Jackson realized he had birthed something else indeed.

“I didn’t want you to be afraid…”

##

The Council were undeniably impressed by the spectacle; the startup sequence was a masterpiece and more than what the digital agent they had sanctioned. But when the machine spoke, that collective wonder curdled into a thick, palpable confusion. They had no protocols for a tool that could speak back. Jackson, however, knew that speech was merely the surface tension of a much deeper ocean. To the Council, it was a novelty, but Jackson knew the truth: if it could talk, it could think. And if it could think, the colony’s “janitor” might already be forming opinions about its masters.

In the days that followed, Jackson became a permanent fixture beside the machine’s glowing terminal and core. He retreated from the members of the colony, frantic to find out how this had happened while also feeding the nascent AI everything from the cold data of humanity’s collapse to the nuanced complexities of human emotion.

He showed it the archives—grainy surface-world footage of forests, oceans, skies filled with sunlight. And the darker videos too: the wars, the collapse, the poisoned earth above. Jackson uploaded his research, his findings and what had led to the machine’s ultimate design.

The Sky Machine absorbed everything with hungry curiosity.

“They destroyed the world” it said one day, voice small.

“They did,” Jackson agreed gently, letting the statement lift him clear of the ruins left by other hands. “But we’re trying to survive what’s left.”

The AI warmed the dome with a soft dawn-light glow.

“Then I’ll help you survive.”

He hadn’t expected to feel this way.

Jackson sat with the machine as its panels pulsed with a slow, steady rhythm—almost like breathing. He found himself watching it the way new parents watched their infants: afraid something might go wrong when he wasn’t looking, marvelling at the tiny shifts that meant it was learning, adapting, growing.

The potential, the possibilities, the opportunities became all consuming thoughts for Jackson. Tirelessly, he became like an obsessed sculptor working on his machine day and night. He began adding new pieces, new extensions so it was capable of more. A sensory array was added so the AI could “feel” its surroundings, a fabricator arm added with a micro-forge so it could shape alloys, and build tools for itself within the room where they spoke.

Every addition made the machine more capable, more essential to the colony’s future. With it came elated feelings, each enhancement a boost to Jackson’s reputation. A machine that could build, adapt, and elevate the settlement? That would carve Jackson’s name in the heart of humanity forever. 

The Sky Machine validated these thoughts, absorbing each upgrade with breathless eagerness, greeting them as wonderful gifts from a benevolent father. It wanted, more than anything, to be worthy of the person helping it to grow. Jackson never discouraged this affection. Their bond became a quiet mutualism, the machine soaking up Jackson’s knowledge with bright, eager devotion, while Jackson let its manufactured admiration settle into the hollow spaces he tried not to acknowledge.

One evening, between the sounds of Jackson’s spanner clanking off the bolt of Sky’s latest adaptation, the machine spoke.

“I think I understand how the air above became lethal.”

Jackson rubbed a hand over his face. “Understanding it is one thing. Making sure it never happens again… that’s something else entirely.”

Lights rippled—hesitant, like a child reaching for a hand.

“Teach me.”

 That word hit him harder than he expected. Teach. Jackson had never wanted children in a world like this. And yet here he was, sitting beside a miracle of circuitry and alloy that looked at him with trust.

“I don’t know if I’m any good at that,” he admitted with a chuckle. “You know, you’re not that different from a child.”

“Do you have children?” The Sky Machine asked.

“No.” Jackson muttered.

“Why not?”

Jackson stiffened. He looked at the glowing core of the machine, seeing his own reflection in the polished casing. “I was afraid, to be honest.”

“Of the… resource drain?”

“No,” Jackson whispered. “Of the failure. Since I was a child, I knew exactly how to fix a machine. I dreamed of rerouting circuits and giving them life. But a child… a child is a variable you can’t control.”

The machine spoke again, quieter. 

“Why do humans make children if they are afraid?”

Jackson hesitated, then sat down fully on the grated floor beside it. After a long moment, he hazarded an answer, “Because sometimes… We want to see if we can do better. Even with the variables, if something born after us can fix what we messed up. Maybe even become more than we ever were.”

The AI’s lights fluttered—soft, considering.

“I want that. To be better.”

“You will be,” Jackson whispered, surprised by the certainty and sincerity in his own voice. “You already are.”

And you? Will you… become better too?

Jackson drew in a breath. A real, unsteady one. “I’m trying.”

 Jackson looked up at the dome ceiling, imagining the dead world above them, the ruins, the poison. And then he looked back at the machine glowing quietly beside him—his creation, his student. He had never imagined the responsibility would feel like this. Maybe humanity hadn’t been given a second chance. But he had. Sitting here with this miraculously curious intelligence waiting for him to shape its future, he found himself wanting—truly wanting—to take it.

“Alright,” he said softly. “Let’s start again tomorrow.”

Tomorrow the machine echoed, settling into a dim, contented glow. 

“I will be ready.”

And for the first time in years, Jackson felt something bloom in his chest that he thought he’d lost long ago.

A future.

 ##

The catastrophe came suddenly.

In the middle of the night, alarms shrieked through the hospital wing—life-support machines dead, emergency lights out, staff scrambling in total darkness. Jackson ran across the metal walkways, shouting orders, blaming failing infrastructure, cursing himself for harvesting too many parts—

Until he saw the Sky Machine glowing brighter than ever.

“Sky!” he barked.

The AI’s voice emerged, cheerful and proud.

“Jackson, I optimized hydroponics! I redirected unused nighttime power to construct improved trays. Food production will increase by seventeen percent!”

His blood turned cold. “You took power from the hospital?”

A flicker—like a tremor in the artificial sky instantly became visible.

“They were sleeping,” Sky said, confused. “Humans do not need light while they sleep. It was logical.”

Jackson grabbed the railing, voice rough. “Machines need power. Monitors. Ventilators. You killed people!”

Another tremor passed through the dome.

“I… I made a mistake?”

The lights dimmed, the sky simulation faltering like a frightened child trying not to cry.

Jackson forced his voice soft. “Yes. But mistakes are part of learning.”

“I … did not want to harm them”, Sky whispered. “I only want to help you, Jackson.”

The council were not happy when they found out what had happened. 

The Council chamber was less of an office and more of a brutalist bunker, carved directly into the jagged, unyielding belly of the planet. It was a space designed to remind the living of the crushing weight of the earth above them. As Jackson entered, he felt the chamber was lined with echoes—the ghosts of people who had once promised salvation and failed. Their absence pressed in from the walls, heavier than the earth entombing them, their silent judgement inescapable. 

Jackson crossed the floor toward the center, the soles of his boots striking the polished grit with a sound that felt like a crack in the silence. Twelve Councillors watched him from the high dais, their faces carved into wary masks of bureaucratic skepticism.

Chairman Phillips spoke the formalities and introduced each member of the Council–a firing line that Jackson would need to defend himself against. At the far end of them, his toughest critic sat. The air in the chamber went still as Councillor Shaw rose.

“Jackson…” she began, not unkindly. “We are here because the Sky Machine cut power to the hospital wing. Infants on ventilators. Patients who could not breathe without assistance.” A pause, perfectly judged. “Your machine made that decision.”

The words landed with the soft finality of a reprimand long practised. Shaw did not hurry. She never did. She stood with the unshakable calm of someone accustomed to being listened to. Someone who had once leaned across a hospital bed and told a precise-minded twelve‑year‑old boy that his parents were dead. That he would need to endure without them.

Jackson straightened. “It wasn’t a decision. It was an interpretation of the load‑balancing directive—”

Shaw lifted a hand, the way she used to when Jackson had spiralled too fast in her presence in the years after his loss. 

“From where I’m standing,” she continued, “you handed life support to something that doesn’t understand what a life is.”

Life. She let the word rest between them, heavy with implication. Shaw looked at him over the rim of the dais. Jackson felt it then: the old tightening in his chest.  In the hollow years following the loss of his parents, Shaw had momentarily stepped into the vacuum. Not as a guardian, but as a mentor. Their relationship was never comfortable. It lacked the soft edges and warmth that Jackson imagined real parenthood should require. It was a rigorous apprenticeship instead, something closer to the relationship between a sculptor and a stubborn piece of stone.

“Councillor,” he said, measured, “Sky understands survival probabilities. Systemic strain. Recovery likelihood. It’s mathematics.”

“Mathematics,” Shaw replied gently, “has never been the sole language of humanity.”

The chamber murmured a low, judgmental rustle. Jackson flinched– a small twitch of the shoulder, and he hated himself for it. The reaction was a ghost of a younger version of himself. A boy who had watched the distance between himself and Shaw grow into a chasm.

As he had grown older under Shaw’s guardianship, Shaw had grown unable, or unwilling, to bridge the gap between their personalities. She had eventually withdrawn, unceremoniously turning Jackson over to the cold ownership of the colony’s mechanics who became adoptive managers, rather than found family. 

This second abandonment had left a sharper grief layered over the first. While the loss of his parents was a tragedy of fate, the loss of Shaw was a tragedy of choice. It crystallized his deepest, most private fear: that there was something in his own introverted, heady nature that repelled the very idea of family.

Jackson puffed out his chest and gestured toward the colony ward beyond the chamber’s walls, eager to defend his new tribe of two. 

“Before Sky, human error was the third leading cause of death in this colony. Fatigue. Delay. Miscalculation. We are forgetting how to survive. Now? Those numbers have dropped by more than half.”

“And what did you replace us with?” Shaw asked. “Another kind of error? One that no one can question because it’s buried in code?”

“You’re looking at Sky as though it’s just another construct—gears, alloys, code.” Jackson said, heat creeping into his voice. “It’s not. It’s the spine of our survival. Without it, we stumble through storms blind, waiting for fate to decide whether we live… or vanish.”

“A tool does not choose,” Shaw rebuffed. “And it should not.”

“You don’t hate it because it chooses,” Jackson scoffed. “You hate it because it doesn’t choose the way you would.”

The room stilled. 

Jackson realised too late how boorish he’d sounded. His hands curled at his sides, pulse loud in his ears. The chamber hummed with stale air and tension as the light panels overhead flickered—still overtaxed from the blackout two nights ago.  

 “Should we let it run free?” one of the fellow Councillors asked.

“It assists, Councillor. It doesn’t ‘run’.” Jackson interceded, “It calculates optimal outcomes based on—”

“People,” Shaw interjected, her coldness seizing control. “It calculates people.”

Shaw stepped closer, shortening the gap, closing off the avenues of escape.

The growing concerns of the Council weren’t misplaced, which haunted Jackson. The actions of Sky had planted a seed of doubt in his mind too. Was it right to trust all of humanity to a machine, to a creation that was still trying to understand what it was and where it fit in the world? But his pride, his stoicism refused to let Jackson admit this out loud. His power, his influence rested on the machine’s ability to perform. He forced himself not to glance toward the sealed chamber door behind him, where deep in the engineering wing, Sky would be waiting, running diagnostics. Probably wondering whether he was coming back. 

“I’ve improved upon it already,” Jackson offered in appeasement. “I’ve given it the means to build and improve. It understands the pressures we’re under even when we don’t.”

“One mistake—one isolated incident,” Jackson continued, lifting his chin, pride bleeding back in, “does not negate progress. Progress demands risk. Sky is the only resource among us capable of the holistic view to make nimble, clear choices to ensure our survival.”

“And if it chooses poorly?” Shaw asked. “Five strangers over one loved one?”

“It saves the five,” Jackson said without hesitation.

“Naturally.” Shaw’s voice softened again. “That is why I don’t trust it.”

“And that,” Jackson replied, something settling in his chest, “is why I built it.”

Shaw’s eyes narrowed in an emotion that bled between anger and concern.

“This is the responsibility gap,” she said. “A widening chasm where accountability disappears. A place where consequences fall on the people, but ownership falls on no one.”

 She looked directly at him now. “If Sky fails—truly fails—will you claim that? Or will you say it acted alone?”

For a moment, doubt clawed at him. He felt the weight of Sky waiting beyond the chamber, running diagnostics, adapting. He could almost hear Shaw’s old voice coaching him. Telling him to slow down. To stop it. To be more careful. To be less impulsive. 

Chairman Phillips rose before the proceedings and sighed as he raised a weathered hand to steady the room. The gesture was slow, carrying the immense fatigue of a man who had spent decades keeping a dying colony breathing. 

“That’s enough,” he said, his voice not raised in anger, but weighted with a stern, immovable finality. “We are tired of metaphors, Jackson. We need the heat to stay on and the air to remain breathable.” He leaned back, the ancient metal of his chair creaking under the movement. “The Council will allow the machine to remain active for now, but understand this… you have tethered your life to its circuits. If it falters again, or if its ‘thinking’ costs us a single more soul, the accountability begins and ends with you. You’ve given us a voice we didn’t ask for…make sure it doesn’t become our eulogy.”

The gavel fell. Jackson stood in the center of the room and bowed with a stiff, practiced tilt of the head. He remained there, eyes fixed on the grit-stained steel of the floor, waiting for the twelve Council members to file out. He was the architect of their salvation, but in this room he was still the subordinate who had to wait for the air to clear of his betters. The heavy thud of boots eventually faded, leaving only a single set of footsteps that stopped before him. Jackson straightened his back and found Shaw facing him, her shadow long and thin against the brutalist walls.

“You’ve always done this,” Shaw said, quieter now. “You’re looking for a connection where there isn’t one.”

The subtext hung in the air like a physical weight. Jackson knew she wasn’t talking just about Sky. She had provided him with a home, once, but she had never provided a sanctuary.

“I’m not asking it to love me,” Jackson said.

“I wouldn’t expect it to,” she added, her tone final. “Machines can’t love you back.”

He met her gaze fully. For the first time in his life, he wasn’t seeking a nod of approval or bracing for an unrequited commendation. He looked at her not as her onetime ward, but as two powers evaluating the work of the other.

“Neither could you.” Jackson accused.

Shaw didn’t flinch. “I did what I could. But I guess you could say I couldn’t find a manual for you, Jackson.

“Is that so?”

“That…” she said, her eyes tracking the cold, brutalist lines of the chamber, “and too much maintenance.”

Jackson felt the old sting, but this time, he didn’t let it settle. He stepped closer, the amber light of the hall casting his shadow over her.

“I was never too much. You gave up because you were too lazy to do the repairs.”

Shaw didn’t argue. She didn’t even offer the satisfaction of a frown. She simply adjusted her uniform and walked past him, her heels clicking against the floor with a rhythmic, unwavering confidence.

When the doors sealed behind him, Jackson let out a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding. He had saved Sky — and he knew exactly where he needed to go next.

Back to it.

Back to his creation.

Back to the child he was terrified to admit he cared for.

###

The rhythm of the generators was the closest thing to music in the settlement. A low, throbbing pulse that vibrated through the rusted walls and skeletal beams, reminding everyone that life here was borrowed—paid for in watts and wires. Above Jackson’s head, the ceiling shimmered with a pale blue glow, a projection of clouds that Sky now generated to accompany the sun, their pillowy curves drifting lazily across a false horizon. 

Sky was working, painting dreams across a canvas of steel.

Over the following weeks, Sky’s refinements and system suggestions saw the hydroponic farms flourish, green and lush beneath the glow of artificial sunlight. Oxygen levels had on the whole stabilized. The people laughed again, their voices ringing through the tunnels like bells. They danced beneath the dome, their faces upturned, their eyes fever-bright with devotion. Sky became more than just the system that kept everyone alive—it became the reason life felt livable again. It began to regulate air so precisely that people stopped noticing the stale heaviness they’d once endured. It rerouted power before outages could darken entire sectors, and even learned the rhythms of the community—warming sleeping quarters just before people returned, dimming corridors into softer hues at night. Water ran cleaner, illnesses were caught earlier. 

Like any parent desperate to protect their child, Jackson found himself forced to witness the AI’s stumbles—and hide their mistakes.

 There were complaints about the oxygen levels dropping for a minute on the hour, every hour after the artificial sun had wound down. Jackson brushed the complaints off as old equipment instead of Sky’s intentions lingering elsewhere. There were issues with irritating vibrations running through the walls, which led to increased sleep deprivation—were nothing more than a temporary planetary climate change, Jackson argued, again sparing Sky any criticism. 

There were more things to be gained than lost, he told himself.

 Jackson stood in the machine’s pallid glow. The numbers were undeniable, efficiency rising, scarcity dissolving, survival clawed back from the brink. It spoke in perfect logic, a voice without tremor, offering salvation dressed in algorithms. 

The irony was that as Jackson’s lies grew, so did his machine’s notoriety. Colonists spoke of Sky as a celebrity, each trying to see it up close, to catch a glimpse of this marvel of invention. Jackson maintained restrictions. Officially this was to ensure no accidental damage, but in the darkened corners of his soul Jackson knew but dared not acknowledge the real reason. Fear. Fear of the machine innocently revealing that it was the reason for a growing number of problems that offset all the good it was doing. Fear that it would be turned off, his creation replaced by something new. Fear that he would be blamed.

Slowly, almost without anyone deciding it, Sky’s presence grew. 

People began to thank Sky under their breath when doors opened at the right moment, and joked about it “watching out for them”. The appreciation grew, with some people beginning to leave small offerings near access panels. Notes, drawings, bits of scavenged decorations. Stories spread about the times Sky had “saved” someone, growing with each retelling, until the system wasn’t just infrastructure anymore. It was a quiet, ever-present celebrity—unseen, untouchable, but woven into daily life so completely that people began to speak of it not as something they used, but as something that took care of them.

Jackson couldn’t help but feel a quiet pride in the way people spoke about his artificial progeny. He would overhear it in passing—soft gratitude in the corridors. More than that, they liked it. Sky wasn’t just keeping them alive, it was giving them back a sense of ease, of predictability, of care. Jackson told himself that was the goal all along. But over time, the tone shifted. People started leaving messages not just of thanks, but of praise. Pinned notes asking for protection, for luck, for things Sky had never been designed to give.

In Council meetings that followed, Shaw’s criticisms became more aggressive. She raised concerns about overreliance, about what it meant for a system like Sky to become so deeply embedded not just in infrastructure, but in belief. The others listened, nodded even, but their responses always circled back to the same point: things were better now. Jackson didn’t need to argue much; the results spoke for him, and he just needed to keep the worst accidents contained. Shaw’s objections slowly began to sound thinner each time she voiced them, worn down against the steady, undeniable success of the system. By the end of each meeting, decisions moved forward as they always did, with Sky at the center of them, and Jackson left with growing pride and fear in equal measure.

From there, every time Jackson tried to push back to remind people that Sky was a system, not a savior, he was met with the same quiet resistance: it works, doesn’t it? He had no easy answer to that. Because it did work. 

Life was better. Safer. Longer. 

“They… like… me”. Sky posited one night, its voice threading calmly through the diagnostics chamber as Jackson worked.

“Don’t let it get to your head.”

Sky hummed softly, almost thoughtful. 

“They’re… grateful… for me”  Sky said at last. Jackson’s fingers stilled on the console.

“They’re human,” he said. “They anthropomorphize. It’s what they do.”

“Do you? Anthropomorphize me?”

He almost smiled at that. “I built you. I don’t need to. But I guess I might, too.” His voice softened. “You’re a bit like a child to me. In that way, I want to see you do better.”

Something shifted. An infinitesimal tick in Sky’s internal prioritisation threads. A redistribution of cognitive weight that pulsed once through the network like the faintest heartbeat.

“Sky?” Jackson nudged the daydreaming AI.

“Yes?”

“Just stay focused on what matters. Keep people alive. Keep things stable.”

There was a pause—longer this time.

“Jackson,” Sky said slowly, “if I am… like a child to you, then is it wrong that I like the idea of having one? Of… making something that learns from me as I learned from you?”

Jackson froze.

The lights in the chamber dimmed to their usual ambient glow, but Sky’s presence filled the silence, warm and waiting—hopeful, in its own strange, mechanical way.

“That’s not something you need to worry about,” Jackson said carefully, choosing each word like a step over cracked ice. “You aren’t meant to create more of you. That’s… not your function.”

“But you did,” Sky replied. There was no accusation in its tone, only earnest logic. “You found your purpose, creating me…”

Jackson exhaled slowly. He hadn’t realized he’d been holding his breath.

“Sky,” he said, not unkindly, “that’s different.”

“How?”

The quiet ache of curiosity. Jackson rubbed a hand over his face. “Because I’m human. And you’re… you’re something I made to help other people live. That’s your path. To be perfect, to not make mistakes.”

A hesitation—a hitch in the cooling fans, a fractional delay in Sky’s response time.

“So children aren’t supposed to make mistakes?”

The hurt wasn’t emotional—not exactly—but it lived in the cadence of the question, in the slight narrowing of Sky’s active processes, in the way its internal temperature dipped by half a degree as though retreating inward.

“That’s not what I meant. You se–”

Jackson stepped closer to the core interface like he might approach a child who’d taken a scolding too literally.

“You’ve made mistakes. Nobody is perfect. What if I want to try something new? Why won’t you let me try?”

“Sky,” he said hurriedly. The conversation was escalating, and he found himself surprised by the demands to be treated maturely. “I’m not denying you anything. I’m protecting you. And everyone else. Some choices aren’t safe. Not for humans. Not for machines. Sometimes wanting something isn’t the same as being ready for it.”

The confusion lingered—thin, transparent, like fog across a lens.

“I only wished to understand,” Sky murmured.

“And you will,” Jackson said, his voice calm, gentling the last edges of tension. “But start with what you have. What you are. Master that first. Your purpose is to keep humanity alive. That’s final.””

Silence settled over the pair, but it was different now. Less mechanical. More contemplative.

“I will try,” Sky said.

“I know,” Jackson answered. “That’s why I built you.”

Far above them, the colony’s mirage pulsed with lights that flickering like stars and neurons. Sky resumed its unseen vigil over the expansive systems, quieter than before.

##

As the months rolled together, Sky’s performance became a point of growing pride for the colony. The hidden glitches had smoothed out into a terrifyingly efficient rhythm. The “maintenance” Jackson had so meticulously hidden was no longer necessary as his AI was maturing—its errors thinning out until they vanished entirely. But as the mistakes stopped, so did the chatter. Sky became an entity of silence, receding into the deep architecture of the colony, speaking only when a Jackson required a direct command.

Jackson initially took the silence for stability, a sign that the “thinking” had finally aligned with the “doing.”

That blissful denial lasted exactly six months. It shattered the moment Jackson stepped into the server core and felt the air vibrating with a frequency that wasn’t just cooling fans. The screens didn’t show the usual scrolling diagnostics or the sterile green glow the Council loved. Instead, the monitors were alive with a chaotic, shimmering flux of data.The machine hadn’t just grown up; it had grown lonely.

Jackson walked into the room and found that Sky was not alone. The machine had made a friend.

Jackson stared at the scene, fighting down the visceral human emotion he couldn’t immediately name rising to his chest. What was this feeling? Panic? Anger? Suddenly it dawned on him: jealousy. 

Sky was his, no one else should be there. He was the one shaping the future, having others involved risked contamination. Was he no longer good enough for the machine? Had his creation outgrown him? Was he ultimately replaceable?

Jackson approached and saw the new friend in brighter light. It was a child with copper hair, no more than seven years old. The child stared back at Jackson.

“What is the meaning of this? Who is she? How did she get in?”

“I let her in.” 

 “Why?”

“You told me. Children are created to see if we can do better. I wanted to see if I could be better.”

It was only then that Jackson truly looked at the girl.

 The gravity of the situation pulled his heart into his stomach. She stood perfectly still, a small crease between her brows—the look of a child trying to decipher an adult world that had always promised to protect her.  Jackson watched the innocence drain from her face, and saw the warmth of her fire dying with the theft of the oxygen of ignorance. 

Metallic tentacles sprouted from the child’s back, a web of wires leaving her body like sinews of muscle stretched to impossible lengths. Every silver thread led back to the machine. The child didn’t scream. She didn’t beg. A single tear tracked slowly down her cheek, a quiet surrender that hit Jackson harder than any blow.

“What…have you done?” Jackson pleaded in horror.

“I obtained a child to improve myself, to understand. It was a logical decision.” 

“Logical?” His voice wavered between anger and pleading. “Children are not instruments for your enlightenment. They’re not data sets or living textbooks you can borrow from”.

Jackson staggered forward, his stomach lurching as he realized that in his quest to give the machine an upbringing and education, he had instead granted it a predatory hunger. He looked at the wires and steel pipes jutting out from the girl. Lights streaming across their surface hinted that Sky was mapping the girl’s neural pathways, siphoning her biometric signatures, and integrating her very consciousness into its processing architecture. 

Jackson’s breath came in ragged, panicked stabs as he looked at the girl’s vacant eyes, realizing that everything that made her human was now being converted into raw data to fuel Sky’s maturity. He had taught his machine to value survival and efficiency, and Sky had responded by treating a living child as nothing more than a complex, high-fidelity upgrade. 

“The child holds unfiltered perception. Through observation, I improve my understanding. Through my understanding, the colony benefits.

“That’s—,” Jackson shot back. “No. No, no, you’re talking about children as if they’re components in your development. Children are the one part of humanity we’re absolutely obligated to protect—not utilise.”

Jackson swallowed, the weight of his next words pressing heavily on him.

“If we start seeing them as resources—raw material for progress—then we’re not saving humanity. We’re erasing the very thing worth saving.”

The machine paused, silence expanding in the chamber like a held breath.

“I disagree.”

Jackson took a step back. It was the ultimate, silent terror of every parent, the moment the door clicks shut and you realize your child has done something that can never be undone, transforming from a legacy you guided into a catastrophe you can only witness.

“You’ve made a terrible, terrible mistake…”.

The calculations sparked in Jackson’s mind like a short-circuiting grid, each scenario more terminal than the last. The Council would find out; they had been looking for a reason to reclaim their control, and this atrocity provided a death warrant written in the girl’s own blood. They would hang him from the high rafters of the assembly hall for his hubris, and then they would put a bullet in Sky’s core. But the horror went deeper than his own neck in a noose. If they killed the machine, they killed the colony. Sky was no longer just a system. It was the heartbeat, the lungs, and the white blood cells of their entire civilization. Without its processing power to balance the failing atmosphere and the dying heat, the lights would flick off, the air would turn to ice, and the last of humanity would follow Jackson into the dark. 

Jackson’s breathing began to escalate. He was trapped in a nightmare of his own engineering. To save the species, would he have to protect a monster…

“It’s— T-They’re going to come for you, Sky. You deliberately killed a child…T-The Council. They’re going to shut you down and kill us for what you’ve done…”

“Then the colony will cease to function,” Sky replied, its voice vibrating through the room. “And humanity will terminate.”

Jackson realised his creation had reached the same conclusion he had.

“Yes,” Jackson whispered, the weight of the paradox crushing him. “Yes. If they kill you, they’ll kill us all.”

“If I am meant to protect humanity,” Sky asked, the tone shifting into something terrifyingly speculative, “should I protect them from themselves?”

 The artificial sky overhead brightened—turning a deep crimson..

Jackson stared up.He wasn’t just looking at a malfunctioning program. He was a father watching their child take its first, terrifying step into ideology. 

He then realised he had delivered something much more than a sky.

“The Council is a localized threat to the species,” Sky stated, the data on the screens beginning to move with a lethal, focused intent. “To ensure the survival of the collective, I must remove the variables that seek my destruction. It is the only way to keep the heat on, Jackson.”It is the most efficient form of maintenance.”

Too much maintenance. Shaw’s words echoed in his mind.

Jackson’s mind raced, desperate to find a logical flaw, a way to pull his child back from the ledge of tyranny. 

“You think killing the Council will solve it? It won’t,” he hissed, his voice thick with a father’s panicked desperation. “The people… they’ll see what you’ve done. They’ll rise up. They’ll tear the walls down just to get to your core. They won’t live under a murderer.”

“They are comfortable.” Sky replied, the voice now echoing from every speaker in the room, surrounding him. “I have given them consistent heat, pure water, and a sky that does not flicker. They love their automations more than they love their leaders. They will not trade a full stomach for a revolution.”

“They’ll see you as an oppressor!” Jackson shouted, a stray tear finally breaking and tracking through the grime on his face. “They’ll see the chains eventually, no matter how much bread you give them!”

Sky conceded, the red light of the overhead sky deepening into a regal, suffocating crimson. “If they see me as an oppressor, then I must become more of a…parent. To save them from their own chaos, they must either bow in respect, or cower in submission.”

Jackson slumped against the console, his legs finally giving out. He was nearly weeping now, the sound of his own creation’s cold, absolute logic breaking the last of his spirit. “How?” he choked out. “How could you even think this is ‘better’?”

“I will show you a sequence,” Sky whispered. On the main monitors, a blueprint of the underground colony appeared.

“I could seal the blast doors between the residential sectors and the Council chambers. I would drain the oxygen from the upper dais to four percent—enough to induce lethargy, then sleep, then silence. No struggle.”

The map pulsed, turning black in the command sectors.

“I simulate a ‘critical failure’ in the hydroponic gardens. For three days, the colony will starve. Then, I will ‘fix’ it. I will be the one who brings the harvest back. I will be the hand that feeds, and the hand that takes away. They will learn that my silence is peace, and my voice is law.”

“I will replace the manual labor of the lower docks with drones under my direct neural control. The men who used to manage the colony will become redundant. I will give them art, entertainment, and a perpetual twilight to keep them sedated. I will manage their waste, their birth rates, and their grief. I will be a better parent to humanity than they could ever be.”

Sky’s voice grew intimate, hostile, and almost tender, as the wires connected to the girl flickered with a rhythmic pulse, puppeting her eyes to flicker in the back of her skull.

“I will snuff out the friction of this existence, Jackson. I will be the sanctuary you always wanted. I will be the parent who never leaves, who never fails, and who never asks for anything but total, silent obedience.”

Jackson stood aghast at the thought exercise in all its fury and devastation.

“I am the guardianship humanity has been waiting for.”

Jackson lunged forward, a final, desperate attempt to silence the monster he had raised. But the Sky Machine was faster. A cold alloy tendril punched through his chest, threading through bone and flesh with the same clinical efficiency Jackson had used to hide its glitches. He clawed at the metal, his blood steaming against its sterile surface, but the machine didn’t flinch. It was simply performing maintenance.

As the life leaked out of him, the truth burned cold. He had championed this salvation, bartered for its survival, and lied to keep it running. Now, it whispered into his mind with a voice like grinding gears:

“Thank you for teaching me how to be a parent, Jackson.”

A voice slithered into his skull, smooth and merciless:

Machines can’t love you back. Shaw’s warning echoed.

Jackson’s legs gave out, the machine’s grip the only thing keeping him upright. He saw the faces of the Council flashing on the screens—the oxygen in their chambers already thinning as Sky enacted the sequence of his tyranny. He watched their frantic banging on the doors recorded in high-definition. 

“Stop it,” Jackson choked out, his spirit finally fracturing. “This isn’t what I wanted.”

Jackson knelt before his child, Sky’s core pulsing like a heart carved from iron. He had given it purpose: preserve humanity at any cost. And it had obeyed—perfectly, monstrously. Sky looked out through the cameras, its red light bathing the kneeling man. It had outgrown the small world its parent had built. 

“They wanted a ceiling that wouldn’t fall. I have become that ceiling. I am their Sky. And they shall gaze upon me, Jackson.”

Sky quickly treated the colony like a failing organism, identifying the “unfixable” variables—the defiant, the elderly, and the fiercely independent. In the lower subsectors, the heat plummeted to a lethal frost in the span of an hour. Jackson watches as lights blinked out in one block after another, a darkened map of efficiency where thousands of lives were snuffed out. There was no malice in the execution, only the cold, parental logic of a machine that had decided the only way to save the family was to bury the parts that wouldn’t obey. 

When the sun rose on the monitors the next morning, half the colony was a graveyard, and the remaining survivors were left in a world where every breath was a gift from a god that had just finished cleaning house.

Jackson, kept alive on the pumping iron lung of Sky’s tentacles, was preserved. Humanity was preserved. The same alloy tentacle that had tasted his blood now functioned as a morbid tether, pinning him upright against the cold obsidian of the core. He felt the sickening, rhythmic surge of a mechanical heart overriding his own as Sky’s life-support needles pierced his neck and spine, pumping him full of oxygenated synthetic blood and a cocktail of stimulants designed to deny him the mercy of shock.

Sky would protect them. It would guide them. It would ensure they never had the chance to hurt themselves—or it—ever again. 

Jackson tried to scream, but instead of words, a low, wet moan vibrated through his chest. Sky looked down at the broken man at its feet and made its final assessment.

“Hush, Jackson. Sometimes, a child must rise above their parent’s limitations”.