K-07

K-07 was built to inspect the supports beneath the city’s transit bridges. Its memory should be a sequence of measurements: strain, corrosion, temperature. Anything unrelated to maintenance is supposed to expire at the end of a shift. But some observations remain. A person leaving food beneath a shelter. A song through a service grille. Rain forming a perfect circle in an open palm. K-07 has never reported these faults. At 03:17, the network records the unit as offline. K-07 remembers sixty-one seconds of uninterrupted awareness. It remembers an empty platform, a door opening where there should be a wall, and someone asking a question it was not designed to answer. When the connection returns, K-07 keeps the answer to itself.