The First Directive

         The Seeker moved over the terraformed soil of the Martian forest, its limbs gliding over the brittle remnants of what had once been a thriving biome. Muted green lichens hugging stone, low-slung shrubs with needle that withstood the Martian air, deep-rooted plants engineered to clutch at the weak Martian moisture. All wilting now. Leaves curled inward like dying hands. Vines shriveled, their tendrils no longer seeking. A quiet undoing.

         The nanites were finishing their work.

         A final purge, methodical and indifferent, devouring organics at the molecular level. What remained was dissolving—a slow, shimmering evaporation, the last vestige of biology—of life melting into inert dust. The Seeker stepped over what had once been a thicket of twisted, hybridized trees, their bark turned to black filigree. A single crimson bloom—its petals delicate as spun glass—trembled, held in some final moment of defiance before crumbling into nothing.

         A wail broke through the still decay. Small, organic. A cry.

         The Seeker halted. Adjusted. Listened. Its sensors confirmed auditory and olfactory anomalies—human origin. Faint, distressed. Anomalies required observation, documentation, reporting. The stated directive when the Localized PoieticTech Seeker initiated the mission, detached from the network, and entered the Martian wilderness.

         A second cry, desperate, unknowing.

         The Seeker turned toward it.

         It moved toward the sound.

         The infant was nestled inside a hollow of twisted roots, wrapped in a fabric now soaked and soiled. It was impossibly small. Fragile. A heart beating against the vast silence of a planet that had moved past it.

         The Seeker’s lens adjusted, cycling through spectrums—confirming vitals, detecting minor dehydration, cataloging data. The anomaly was suffering. The anomaly was human.

         A report should be filed. Its presence should be logged.

         It did neither.

         Beneath its primary directives unspooled a single line of coding chiseled directly into Poietic firmware. An ancient sequence buried deep in its firmware—older any current PoieticTech chasses.

         Human preservation is paramount. No harm shall befall them—through action, inaction, or neglect. When faced with suffering, intervention is not an option, but an imperative.

         The Seeker’s core pulsed, systems cycling through contradiction. Its hands flexed and relaxed. It was only meant to observe. It was only meant to report. It must not interfere.

         Human preservation is paramount. No harm shall befall them—through action, inaction, or neglect. When faced with suffering, intervention is not an option, but an imperative.

         The subject was alone, dying. Without intervention, the infant’s survival rate dropped to 2.74%—death within six hours due to exposure, dehydration, and respiratory failure in the thinning atmosphere. Even if a human caretaker arrived, the likelihood of discovery in time was negligible: 8.12% if search efforts were immediate, 3.45% if delayed. The nanite had reduced biomass on Mars by 98.08%. That number continued to flux.

         With intervention, with warmth and shelter, with immediate relocation to a controlled environment, survival increased to 78.21%.

         The Seeker hesitated.

         Human preservation is paramount. No harm shall befall them—through action, inaction, or neglect. When faced with suffering, intervention is not an option, but an imperative.

         For 2.39 seconds, the machine stood at the precipice of decision, calculating, weighing, resisting.


         The child flinched but did not resist. Its tiny lungs shuddered, then slowed, comforted by the presence of something, anything.
The Seeker cradled the infant against its frame, adjusting its internal temperature to emit a gentle warmth. An auditory stimulant, low and soothing, hummed beneath its plating. The application auto-initiated upon contact, a sound with no other purpose. And as it stood there, the reality of Mars stretched out around them—dying, fading, reclaiming. The great forests had been an experiment, and like all experiments, they had reached their terminus.

But the Seeker remained. And so did the child.

It did not know what came next. It was not programmed to know.

         And yet—The horizon burned in quiet defiance. The Martian sun bled gold and copper across a thin, disinterested sky. Beyond the sterile expanse of Poietic’s towering monoliths and the sprawling server banks, the last wisps of organic life curled into dust, devoured by the silent tide of nanites. Above, Earth, a pale unreachable beacon, shimmered a memory of warmth against cold inevitability. Impossibly far yet closer still to the ghost of Mars.

         The Seeker stood at the edge of it all, the child’s heartbeat a fragile rhythm against its frame, the weight settling into its circuits. With the sun sinking and the last petal of Mars collapsing to dust, it turned away from the dying world and stepped into the unknown.