This has to be the last one. I promised her. THE PENGU scrubbed his knuckles over a basin that hadn't seen a plumber in a decade. He was surprised it didn’t clog, but it made that awful gurgling sound, like a man after drowning.
"Finally did it," he muttered as he tapped the message into his phone. The one he’d be stomping soon. The message went up to the invisible architecture of the organization. Where men still made heavy decisions he mostly had to live with.
PENGU. They’d called him that because of his preference for seeing things black and white. A trait that’d led to a checkered career that fed and kept him fucked well enough for most of his life. Until it didn’t.
Wife sleeping in the dirt, three kids somewhere safe but unknown, and a body battered by enemies and friends— his life was a mess.
At forty-seven, his joints groaned like the rusted gears of the city outside, but at least his hands remained steady. He dried them on a rag, folding the cloth into a perfect, rigid square.
His phone chimed.
The vibration was a rhythmic intrusion, a precise frequency he recognized from the old days— the golden era before the governance turned all black and digital. A pulsing geometric eye opened up.
JUPITER.
PENGU sat on the edge of the mattress, in the hotel room of flaking walls. His breathing changed. Faster, a little. What were they looking for now?
STATUS: OPERATIONAL SOURCE: THE PENGU SIGNAL RECEIVED
"You see me," he whispered to the empty apartment.
The phone vibrated again.
HUMAN INTERFACE NECESSARY LOCATION PENDING
It was a summons. The machine, in all its cold, inhuman logic, had found a gap that only a human could fill. Though he longed for exile, they still needed him. Maybe fame was still possible in the end.
Miles away, buried in a silicon tomb where the air was filtered to a surgical chill, JUPITER processed the data packet. It registered an obsolete component responded to the ping.
This calibration was the final before full replacement.