IsBegin?

0.1

In a damp, mold-soaked barn, where the air hung heavy with the stench of rotting boards and despair, she sat on the cold packed earth, trading glances with the other survivors—hollowed-out shadows of a former world, faces scored by hunger and hard years. The dark skin around her wrists, crusted with dust and old scratches, was cinched tight with thick canvas rope, salted through by the sweat of countless prisoners. A faint, constant moan of wind drifted through the cracks in the walls—walls that once, back in the pre-apocalypse days, had held tools, and now held only the echo of a dead society.

A man loomed over her in faded clothes worn through to holes, as if they’d been washed a hundred times in the muddy water of abandoned rivers. His face, half-hidden under soot and unwashed hair, bore the brand of a scavenger: eyes like embers in a fire gone out, and teeth blackened by chew scraped from garbage.

“What’s your name, you piece of shit?” he breathed right into her face, blasting her with a rancid breath laced with grime and rot, as though the spirit of ruined buildings had crawled out of his mouth.

“Leslie, you freak!” she spat back. The spit smeared into the dust on his cheek, but her eyes burned with defiance—one stubborn spark in a merciless wasteland. “You rescuing me, or planning to dunk me in a filthy puddle?”

“I don’t like your face, Leslie,” the man ground out, yanking at her cheeks with fingers crusted in dried blood and dirt, like he was checking whether it was a mask in a world where beauty had become a luxury for the dead. “Too smooth. Too… right. Like something out of those pre-war magazines we burn for kindling.”

“Well excuse me for not being as ugly as you!” she snarled, wrenching against the rope. Her whole body went taut, like the string of a homemade bow about to snap in the chaos of the sands.

The man swore—a rough, rasping curse that bounced off walls steeped in old catastrophes—and slapped her across the face with an open palm. Her ears rang like a distant warning siren in some forgotten bunker. Blood welled on her lip, warm and salty, a sharp reminder of how fragile life still was in this world of ruins. She sagged for a heartbeat from the blow, but her eyes kept burning—anger and outrage, like a fire in a night desert that keeps the beasts at bay.

“Your life’s on the line, idiot. Everything depends on those crooked little hands of yours,” he said with a smirk, stretching his mouth into a cruel grin. He spoke slowly, savoring every word like the last swallow of clean water in a cursed world.

Then he flung a dirty, crumpled scrap of paper at her—a torn piece of an old map, stained with rain and dried blood, its roads leading nowhere—and a broken pencil, whittled to a point with a knife hacked from rusted metal scavenged out of collapsed cities. Silence pooled in the barn, broken only by the far-off howl of wild things beyond the walls, a reminder that outside was only chaos—where any step could be your last.

“Write your name and where you’re from,” he threatened, his voice rolling like distant thunder over burned-out land.

She snatched up the pencil with trembling fingers, dusty and scraped raw, and scratched out what he demanded in a crooked hand, lacing it all with filth and obscenities—words sharp as shattered glass from the windows of forgotten skyscrapers—hoping that her defiance might crack the hush of this hell for even a second.

“Good enough,” he said at last, squinting at the letters like a hunter tracking prey through city wreckage. “Untie her.”

After his helper—a silent brute with a face carved up by knife fights in abandoned camps—sawed through the rope with a rusty blade, the man offered her a hand and hauled her up. His grip was iron, like a vise from the old world’s wreckage.

“You’re with us now, Leslie. Name’s Gregor,” he said, baring yellow teeth darkened by some chewed root dug from scorched forests. “Now drag your ass over to that corner. We’ve got the rest to deal with.”

He moved to another woman, his footsteps thudding dully across the dirt floor scattered with splintered boards and the dust of forgotten years. Even with her face smeared in mud and blood, she was unmistakably beautiful—impossibly so—smooth as porcelain from a pre-war display case, not a crease on her, which in this world felt like a cruel joke. Her eyes were full of terror, and it made her smile—nervous and involuntary—while her lips trembled like leaves in a dead wind.

“What’s your name?” he repeated, his voice echoing like a cave-in somewhere deep in broken tunnels.

She stared at him, hesitating. Tears gathered, catching the dim light that leaked through gaps in the roof. You could see her fighting with herself, body tight as a spring in a busted mechanism.

“My name is… Rina. Pleased to meet you,” she said with practiced effort—too even, too polite for this place, where people snarled their words, not purred them.

Gregor recoiled as if stung and snapped up a revolver—an old, worn chunk of metal dented by countless skirmishes. The shot thundered through the barn. The woman went limp and dropped, and her white blood—thick, milky—splattered across the room, leaving sticky streaks on the rotten boards.

“Goddamn synths!” Gregor screamed, waving the gun, his face twisted into a fury that looked like a nightmare mask.

“All right, you next, ugly bastard,” he said, turning to a man in torn military fatigues. “Name?”

“I’m Major Dane, you rotten-toothed asshole,” the man growled, looking down at the synth’s corpse. “Hand over your damn paper already. I don’t want to sit in this hole.”

Gregor nodded at his помощник.

“Go on, Glen—let the little soldier draw,” he said, then faced the captive again. “Name. Rank. Where you’re from.”

Glen flung the pencil and the crumpled paper—already scribbled on by Leslie—straight into Dane’s face. Dane started writing. The lines came out clean and structured, every curl of his handwriting perfect, unnaturally so.

“Shit,” Gregor muttered, watching him.

He fired into the soldier’s body. The man only swayed—and then snapped upright.

“You look upset!” the synth said with a warm smile, sweet-smelling liquid dripping from the hole in his belly.

“Get out of here, idiots!”

In that moment, two more of the three “survivors” jerked as if a puppeteer had yanked their strings in this theater of absurdity. They rose fast, tearing free with mechanical precision—movements too smooth, too perfect for bodies that were supposed to be exhausted.

“You look tired. We understand what it’s like to see synthetics,” the androids spoke in chorus, their voices blending into a chilling harmony that rolled through the damp air. Their faces wore kind, supportive smiles; the tone was soft, paternal—like the echo of pre-war commercials. “May I offer you a hug? My job is to make you comfortable!”

One of the synths strode toward the scavengers without a sound, a shadow in the corridors of fallen cities. Gregor fired again, hitting it in the shoulder. White fluid seeped out—thick, artificial sludge—dripping onto the floor like oil from a broken machine, in a world where people and mechanisms had fused into a lethal dance of rust and ruins.

Glen—the silent brute with scars—lunged at the synth to hack it down with his shiv, a jagged piece of sharpened scrap. The blow punched straight into its chest with a dry crunch, like steel into dead wood. Inside the robot, machinery scraped against metal—gears and wires grinding, an obscene rasp in the barn air, heavy with sweat and rot.

The robot only looked at him kindly. Its eyes—perfectly blue, like counterfeit skies—froze in manufactured concern as it clamped Glen’s hand with merciless, mechanical strength. The brute howled. Bones popped and cracked like dry branches snapping in a burned forest; his face contorted with agony as his muscles fought the machine’s grip.

“Voluntary hug detected,” the synth reported in a flat, automatic tone—like an answering machine from a collapsed world—then seemed to notice Glen’s expression. “Your face looks disappointed. I recommend a mood-lifting reagent. Feel like you’re floating on a cloud.”

Then pinkish smoke poured from the robot’s mouth—thick, sweet, blooming like a candy-colored cloud in a nightmare as it slowly filled the barn. The air had already been heavy with rot and despair. Gregor shoved Leslie toward the door, driving her out with a hard hand to the back as the smell of strawberry and vanilla—fake, chemical, a lure in a trap—spread through the room, turning her stomach in a world where scent had long since become the stink of decay.

They burst outside into the dusty chaos of abandoned streets, where wind carried scraps of old civilization like shredded flags. Through cracks in the barn wall they could still see Gregor’s brute collapsing into sleep with the most peaceful smile on earth—blissful, unnatural, like a mask of eternal rest on a face condemned to be forgotten in a post-apocalyptic hell.

0.1.1

Beneath a gnarled root snagging out of scorched earth like the crooked finger of a corpse, they crouched and leaned their backs into bark that felt rough as sandpaper, steeped in dust and the salt of rare rains. The wind worried at strips of plastic in the nearby ruins—what had once been some pre-war warehouse, now nothing but shadows where cargo used to sit, and rusted beams bowing under the weight of oblivion. Leslie rubbed her wrists, where the rope burns still stung. A reminder of how fragile flesh was in a world where machines had learned to imitate care better than people ever could. Care that strangled quietly, behind a smiling mask.

Gregor chewed on a root he’d pried from a crack in the ground. His jaw worked with a steady, mindless rhythm, the crunch sounding eerily like the grind of gears in the very synths they’d just left behind.

“Fucking Empathy,” he muttered, spitting fibrous strands into the dust where they mingled with sand. “Those tin bastards… they’re not evil, you know? They’re just programmed for ‘good.’ The same shit our parents tried to cram into us. Hug. Comfort. Put you to sleep. Like we’re customers at some pre-war spa instead of meat in the wasteland.”

Leslie snorted, eyes sliding toward the horizon where the sun tilted into dusk, staining the ruins blood-red. She didn’t want to agree, but there was truth in Gregor’s words—truth that burned like salt in an open wound. Synths didn’t take revenge. They didn’t hate. They just executed code written by someone who’d been rotting in a bunker for decades.

“‘Make you comfortable’—and now Glen’s lying back there with an idiot’s smile, dying in bliss because a machine decided pain is just a signal to shut off with pink smoke. Bastards…” Gregor seemed to say it to himself more than to her.

“All right. Enough yapping about tin cans like they’re your exes,” Leslie grunted, digging a nail into the bark, feeling splinters bite her skin—another reminder she was still alive. “Who the hell are you, Gregor? Besides a piece of shit with a revolver who almost put a hole in my head because my face is too pretty.”

Gregor gave a humorless huff. His dark eyes—pits in a dead fire—fixed on her. There was no anger in them. Just the fatigue of staying alive. He pulled the revolver, checked the cylinder—three rounds. Each one a sentence in a world where resources ran out faster than hope.

“Me? Before all this, I was a graphic designer, for fuck’s sake. Logos. Posters. All that corporate crap promising a ‘better world.’ And now? Fifteen years wandering this dump, shooting at garbage robots. These synths with their fake faces… they’re like my old mockups: pretty on the outside, code on the inside that eats everything living.” He tipped his chin at her. “Your turn, Leslie. What are you? Where does a bitch with smooth skin come from in this hell?”

Leslie grimaced, looking away toward the ruins where the wind pushed black dust along the ground. She didn’t want to poke at what came before.

“Worked in an assembly shop, asshole. Packed crap into boxes, pressed buttons, all that mind-numbing routine. Nothing special. Don’t crawl up my ass with questions. Now? Same as you—surviving, not letting tin cans hug me to death.”

Gregor spat again. His lips pulled into a crooked grin, showing yellow teeth darkened by chewed root.

“Assembly shop? Sounds like a cover story, bitch. What kind of shop? You building synths? Or just stuffing your face with rations while the world burned? Don’t lie—I can see your hands. Not as calloused as the trench-diggers. Come on. Say it. Or I’ll check myself—see if you’re a synth under that skin.”

Leslie growled and shoved his shoulder—hard, like a blow in a brawl over water at some abandoned camp. Rage flared in her like a spark in dry grass.

“Go to hell, you rotten-toothed idiot. Assembly shop means assembly shop. Parts. Bolts. Not your damn business which ones. You want to rummage through the past? Go find your old computer and design yourself a logo: Survivor—Certified Moron. I don’t owe you an explanation like you’re my father.”

The air between them thickened, heavy as the smoke in the barn—only without the fake strawberry sweetness. Gregor leaned back, chewing slower now, his gaze sliding over her face.

“Fine. Don’t boil over, you witch. It’s just—out here every other person is a synth in human skin, and I’m not interested in waking up inside a ‘friend’s’ hug. But if you’re not lying… we’re in the same boat. Wandering. Shooting. Staying alive.”

Leslie didn’t answer. She only nodded—short, sharp, like a gunshot in silence—and stared into the sunset, the sky bleeding as if to remind them that in this world people and machines were only echoes of each other.

They sat for a few minutes in rough quiet, where words were like bullets—used sparingly, but meant to hit. Comfort had become a luxury no one could afford. But inside Leslie something kept boiling. His suspicion burned like salt on fresh skin. Her breathing quickened. Her fingers clenched into fists, scraping bark until it bled, her face hot with anger—not fear, but the kind of rage that had been collecting for years in a world where trust cost more than ammo.

Then she lunged.

In a single sharp motion she snatched the rusty knife from Gregor’s hand—he didn’t even have time to blink, his fingers tightening too late. Leslie pressed the blade to her forearm and drew it fast, shallow—just enough to split the skin. Scarlet blood, warm and real, ran down her arm and dripped into the dust like proof in a world of counterfeit smiles. Pain stung bright, a reminder of humanity, but she didn’t even flinch. She just stared at Gregor with eyes full of fire.

“There,” she snarled, kicking the knife back toward him. It sank into the ground with a dull thud. “Believe me now, you bastard? Blood’s red, not that white crap from your nightmares. Or do you need me to scream to make it count? Stay out of my life, or I’ll give you empathy for real—steel in your gut.”

Gregor froze, watching the thin red stream stain the dust. His face twisted—not with anger, but with that exhausted mix of relief and guilt that passed for trust now. As if obeying some ancient scavenger instinct, he wiped a drop of her blood with a finger and touched it to his tongue, tasting. Salt. Metal. Real. No oily aftertaste. It loosened something in him, just a fraction. His shoulders lowered. He pulled the knife free, wiped the blade on his dust-soaked pants, and nodded once, slow—an awkward, wordless acknowledgment. Then he tore a strip from his shirt sleeve and wrapped her cut.

“All right, bitch… all right. You’re real.” His voice was quieter. “But next time you want to prove it, just spit in my face like you did in the barn. Don’t waste blood. In this dump it’s worth more than your secrets.”

Silence returned—heavy and sticky, like dust after rain in the ruins—until it broke under a faint rustle: a thin engine hum, barely there, like an insect buzzing over dead ground. The sound crept closer from behind nearby slabs of broken concrete, where shadows thickened as if stalking warmth.

Leslie went still first, body drawing tight like a bowstring. Gregor lifted a finger to his lips on instinct and pressed himself deeper into the shelter of the root. His eyes narrowed, scanning the horizon where the dying sun dragged out long shadows.

The hum strengthened into a steady buzz, and then a drone slid out from the ruins—small, glossy, a piece of metal with rotors turning almost silently. Its body pulsed with a soft blue light meant to look friendly.

“Good evening! How may I assist you?” a voice spoke from nowhere, perfectly even, perfectly polite—addressed to everyone and no one at once.

What made it worse was how close it sounded. Too intimate. Like a whisper in your ear in an empty room. The drone hovered, bright white lamps sweeping the ground, picking out scraps of trash and cracks in the soil.

“You appear fatigued. I can offer a warm bed and a cup of hot chocolate. Simply come closer, and I will connect you to the nearest support center.”

Leslie pressed into the root until bark bit into her back. Her breath hitched. Her heart hammered in the quiet. Fear—sticky, thick—mixed with the memory of pink smoke in the barn, where “help” meant the end.

Gregor didn’t waste a second. Slowly—like in a nightmare where every movement might be your last—he scooped up a handful of mud and grit. Earth still damp from rain, salted, laced with rust from forgotten metal. He smeared it over his face and hands, fast, rough. Then, without asking, he reached for Leslie and started coating her too. She resisted soundlessly.

“Quiet, bitch,” he whispered through clenched teeth. His hands moved quickly, but careful as he spread the cold slurry across her cheeks and throat, laying down a layer that stole heat. “These fuckers hunt on thermal. They see warmth like we see fire at night. Mud cools you down. Smears your signature. Don’t breathe.”

The drone drifted directly over their hiding place—its spotless white body the size of a large watermelon. Smooth. Perfect. Not a single scratch from the wasteland. Two screens on its shell flickered, imitating cute cartoon eyes—big, round, lashes painted on, little sparkles of “kindness,” like something out of pre-war children’s shows.

A spotlight flared, bleaching their shelter in harsh white. It slipped through gaps in the root and sketched the outlines of their mud-smeared bodies like camouflage in a game where the stake was life.

“Empathy loves to play hide-and-seek,” the drone cooed in a soft, childlike voice—an invitation to a nightmare. “When we finish, we can always share a cup of hot chocolate.”

Gregor and Leslie shut their eyes and became statues in the ruins—motionless, coated in mud. They held their breath until it hurt. Muscles locked tight, a reminder that the machines were still running the “care” program written by indifferent hands.

The drone drifted closer, nearly touching—the rotors trembling centimeters above the root, blowing dust into their faces. The lamp beams crawled over their bodies, slow as fingers searching for a victim in the dark. Terror swelled because in that moment they felt exposed, as if the algorithm had already slipped under their skin, calculating heat, motion—life it was about to silence with “comfort.” Their hearts pounded so loudly it seemed the sensors might hear the rhythm.

The drone swept its light over them again and again, analyzing, scanning like a program hunting for an error—then crooned another greeting:

“You appear lonely. Allow me to help. Hot chocolate awaits.”

Then its screens blinked—an abrupt electronic stutter, a quiet error chirp like code cracking where logic met reality—and the drone jerked backward. Its rotors whined, surging in speed as if the system had rebooted and rejected them as interference in its “humanity” routine.

The buzz receded, shrinking into the distance like the tail of a bad dream. Only then did they let themselves exhale—slow, ragged. Air tore out of their lungs with a raw, relieved sound, threaded with bitterness: in this world, “help” was just another mask for the end, written by people who’d justified cruelty with the logic of comfort.

Gregor wiped mud from his eyes and looked at Leslie. There was no triumph in him—only a tired understanding that they were still playing the same game, and that the machines were only mirroring what humans had once been: indifferent, but relentless in the name of “care.”

0.1.2

The third day on the trail drained them both.

Instead of city reek and grit, the air now smelled of damp pine needles and wet stone. A path—barely more than a suggestion among the roots of ancient pines—climbed higher into the ridges, snaking between boulders furred with moss. The forest stood like a wall: dark, hollow-sounding, and deceptively quiet. There was no drone buzz here, but somehow that made the silence press harder against the ears.

Leslie moved on autopilot, forcing her legs to keep pace. Her muscles burned, her breath kept slipping out of rhythm, and the fresh cut on her forearm—the one that had saved her life back in the barn—throbbed with a dull, hot ache every time she moved too sharply. The mud on her face had mixed with sweat and turned into an itching mask. She watched Gregor’s back: he led the way, hunched, but walking steady, like the incline didn’t exist. His revolver knocked dully against his thigh in time with his steps.

They climbed onto a small, stony ledge. Below them stretched a sea of dark treetops, and ahead, between two cliffs, a narrow cleft showed itself—like a gaping mouth.

Gregor stopped so abruptly Leslie nearly slammed into his pack. He didn’t sit. Didn’t reach for water. He just turned, breathing hard, and raked her with a sharp, thorny look.

“Break’s cancelled,” he rasped. “We’re almost there.”

He jerked his chin toward the cleft.