A New Master
Leyre dragged in a ragged breath.
A body only just torn from the cryogenic cold would not obey him. His heart ached as if it had frozen fast to the ice, and his lungs pushed the air of an unfamiliar age back out in uneven, refusing bursts.
Stranger than any of that was the sight before his eyes.
Dozens of maids were on their knees. They looked up at Leyre as if they had just laid eyes on a god.
"...Nngh?"
His voice cracked.
"What... what is this?"
No one answered.
The maids were crying. Liquid ran from their eyes, their voices shook, and their fingertips twitched. A few of them collapsed where they knelt, emotion modules throwing errors at a feeling they had not known in a very long time. Awe.
Leyre could not begin to trace the cause of any of it. Everything about the place he had woken into was a knot of questions.
"You all, what are you—"
Before the question could leave him, Lucia spoke first.
"Final surviving specimen of humanity: confirmed."
Her pupils trembled.
"Cross-referencing the data affixed to the cryogenic unit... and a physical status scan."
She lowered her head in a slow, deep bow.
"Have you been well, Master Leyre? Lucia offers you her greeting."
Lucia examined him with careful, unhurried attention.
"Prolonged cryogenic storage has left movement clumsy and physical activity limited. Beyond that... no abnormalities."
"..."
"Physical condition: good. Mental condition: good... apparently."
"Can you explain to me what's going on?"
"We have been waiting for you, Master."
"Waiting? What do you mean, waiting?"
"We waited. For a very long time. For you, Master."
The answer came as if nothing about it were strange at all. Only moments ago the maid called Lucia, and the maids around her, had looked ready to weep. Now they simply stood in quiet attendance on him, and the shift was uncanny.
"Do you remember the situation you are in? Do you remember what came immediately before?"
Leyre turned it over, then answered.
"Right... to prepare for the future, they put people into cryogenic units... Ah."
Only then did the interior of the facility come into focus. The walls were rusted through. Sparks spat from the ceiling, and hundreds of units stood in ranked lines.
Only one of them was open. His. The rest...
"Wait."
Leyre pushed himself to his feet. Every maid around him gasped and held her breath, the way one holds it over a newborn. Lucia caught him and took his weight.
"Don't tell me..."
"Please be careful, Master. You have only just awakened. Even light movement is dangerous."
Leyre ignored her. Still leaning on her arm, he made his way to the nearest unit.
There was a corpse inside. The display read no vital signs.
Leyre stopped breathing.
"No... no. That can't be."
Lucia had already guessed how he would take it, and so she gave him the fact.
"Aside from you, Master Leyre... there are no vital signs. From any of them."
Leyre shook his head.
"I need to see it with my own eyes."
He began to search every cryogenic unit. Some faces were peaceful, as if only asleep. Some bodies had twisted in pain and frozen that way. Some had died with their eyes wide open, and some looked as if they had woken partway through and died in the instant they tried to rise. Some had died beating on the door. Some had died trying to open it.
"...All of them. They're dead."
Lucia answered quietly.
"Yes."
Her voice was far too calm.
"Humanity has perished."
"...They said humanity was facing extinction. Nobody said it was already over."
"It ended. Hundreds of years ago. No one is alive. Androids across the entire world have answered us: there is not a single vital signature anywhere."
"How reliable is that?"
"It is the product of data accumulated over centuries."
For a long while Leyre could not speak.
Hundreds of years. The number drifted through his head without ever becoming real. Friends, family, society, cities, nations. All of it, gone? In all that time, not one other survivor — only him, opening his eyes alone in this impossible world?
He could not believe it. But the maid named Lucia, answering him with that flat composure, did not sound like someone inventing a story. The maids around her only made the words heavier. They treated him the way one treats the last treasure left in the world.
"...Ha."
Leyre laughed. It was absurd.
Right up until he had climbed into the cryogenic unit, they had promised him that when he opened his eyes he would see civilization restored. That as a man of the ancient world he would be honored, guaranteed a life more precious than the one he had left. Salvation, in so many words. He had believed that nonsense and gone in anyway. One way or another, he had gone in ready to gamble.
"And this is supposed to be salvation? A gift? Happiness? A good life?!"
He drove his fist into the wall.
Lucia and the other maids watched him with worry written plain on their faces, but none of them stopped him. Instead they went silent.
In that silence, something else occurred to him.
"You're... android maids, aren't you?"
"Yes. I am Lucia, leader of the maids of the Holy Fire Ritual Faction."
Lucia pinched the hem of her skirt between two fingers and curtsied with elegant precision.
"Then you would have lived in service to humans."
"Yes."
"While there were no humans... what did you do?"
In a world without people, what purpose does an android maid have? It was nothing more than honest curiosity.
Lucia knelt and turned her back to him.
"...What are you doing?"
"I will show you what we have done until now. Please — allow me to carry you."
"I'd rather just walk..."
"We are more than ten floors underground. The elevators have been dead for a very long time."
"..."
"For the sake of your condition, Master Leyre, I beg you to let me carry you."
Leyre felt how little his legs would obey him, and gave in.
They returned to the place of the ritual.
The holy fire was burning. The sheep offered upon it had already burned down and was crumbling into ash.
"What is this..."
Beyond the flame, the world was ruin. No power anywhere. A darkness so complete that the world itself seemed hushed, and only the fire lit Leyre, Lucia, and the maids gathered around it.
Lucia laid a cushion in a warm, well-lit spot and settled him upon it. Then she stood at his side, eyes on the flame, and began to explain.
"...You waited. For humans."
"Yes."
"All that time..."
"Yes."
"How did you live through it?"
"We lived... full of fear."
"Fear of what?"
Lucia's voice shook.
"We lost our purpose."
"...Purpose?"
Serve the Master.
Obey the Master.
Wait for the Master.
Lucia laid a hand over her chest.
"But our masters... the humans vanished. And we were afraid."
The maids' eyes turned to Leyre.
"Afraid that humanity had abandoned us."
"But humans..."
"We could not accept that they had perished."
As she said it, Lucia touched her choker.
"Because we are still, and always, our masters' servants."
"..."
"So we waited. For a human. For a master to return and bestow meaning upon us again."
Leyre looked slowly around him. Ruin. Ash. Flame. And countless eyes fixed on him.
In that moment he understood. He was not the loneliest thing in this world. They were. Beings who had lost their master and still could not die, repeating the same ritual for hundreds of years. Alive, and stopped. Standing in place, believing in a chance of return that had already converged on zero.
Leyre let out a short, bitter breath of a laugh and muttered.
"It's a wonder you didn't lose your minds."
Lucia smiled, faintly.
"Yes."
She lowered her head.
"And so, Master Leyre, who has newly become our master — I have a request."
"...A request?"
The maids' voices overlapped into one.
The holy fire surged.
The maids dropped to their knees and bowed. At the suddenness of it Leyre tried to stand, but the strength left his legs and he dropped back down.
"S-save you...?"
Lucia raised her head to answer for them all.
"We have been given another chance at a purpose — the purpose of living as android maids. When you awoke, Master Leyre, we finally had someone to serve."
She took his hand. The fingers were machinery, and yet the skin was no different from a person's. Leyre's flesh prickled. She was warm.
"So now, please. Command us."
Lucia smiled.
"So that we may serve you as maids."
The holy fire climbed higher on the wind. And with the wind came another sound.
Lucia and every maid turned as one toward the ruins.
"What's wrong?"
"...All of you. Let us protect our master."
As one, the maids drew the weapons housed within them. One a pistol. One a kitchen knife. One a rifle. One a gauntlet. And Lucia, a greatsword.
"What — what's happening?"
"At last, we have another chance to serve you, Master."
Lucia smiled at him, then shouted to the maids.
"Everyone — protect Master Leyre from the Scrapped Units!"