New Cambridge’s air clung to Khafre’s tongue — metallic and briny, like sucking on a coin. He’d never gotten used to it, and the taste lingered long after the solar ferries docked.

The city was all glass and steel. Sunlight bounced off the domes, making him squint. You’d think he’d be used to it by now.

Outside it was the same mess: flood lines on old post-boxes, salt on the pavements, fields blown raw. In here, though, it was all polished surfaces and the quiet hum of machines and pumps — too quiet.

He arrived early, as always, out of habit, not virtue. The lift shuddered upwards, its glass walls showing off the city below. Khafre barely glanced at the algae vats; he’d seen enough green for one lifetime. The turbines spun out there, always churning, always hungry. He wondered what it would sound like if they stopped.

Adjusting his collar, he felt the synthetic fabric chafe his neck. It was almost ten years since Cairo fell and he was still dressing for sandstorms.

Gaia awaited him in a room that felt more like a tomb than a laboratory. The room was so clean his voice came back thin. Holographic screens flickered with data streams, their light pooling cold on the android’s cream-coloured plastic shell.

He fit the briefing: a face buffed almost to unreality, its smoothness too practised for a man who’d lived in containers, with eyes an unhelpful, factory blue. When he moved, the soft murmur of servos whispering—the small whine you hear when a lift starts.

“Dr Malik.”

The voice was warm, a carefully engineered sound, but a faint static undercurrent betrayed its origin — a collage of a million different speakers. “You’re earlier than my schedule predicted.”

The compliment, if that was what it was, jarred him. He ignored it, setting his phone on the workbench. Its screen was slightly cracked from where he'd dropped it on the concrete a few days earlier.

“Let’s skip the diagnostics,” Khafre said. “You’ve read my file. I assume you’ve also read every paper on ethical calculus, from Kant to the Kyoto Protocols?”

Gaia tilted its head. The motion was unnervingly perfect, a textbook human gesture that no human ever actually makes. “I know the data. But data isn’t enough. I need to feel what you felt. You worked on the Nile Basin collapse…”

“It’s a matter of public record,” Khafre cut him off, sharper than intended. He shoved the thought aside. “You want nuance? Start by deleting ‘empathy matrices’ from your lexicon. Humans don’t trust vocabulary invented by their replacements.”

A pause. Gaia’s fingers twitched — an awkward gesture, like someone unsure whether to speak or stay silent. “Noted. May I rephrase?”

Gaia leaned forward, and for a brief moment, the angle of his shoulders mirrored Mira’s: too eager, too earnest, elbows always on the table. She was sixteen, a smudge of ink on her cheek, sketching solar stills for a school project.

Khafre blinked. The memory dissolved.

“How,” Gaia asked slowly, “do you define hope?”

The question hung in the air.

Khafre snorted. “Straight from the manual, is it? Extract pain, feign empathy, repeat and refine the algorithm?” He let the corporate jargon drop. “Hope? That’s for people who can still afford illusions. Ethics?” He scoffed. “Start with responsibility. Not bloody spreadsheets.”

Gaia didn’t flinch. “Yet you persisted in ecological restoration, a field with an 83% failure rate in post-collapse zones. Why?”

“Because the desert took my daughter, not the sea.” The words came out laced with acid. He saw Mira’s face for just a second: sunburnt, grinning, hair stuck to her forehead. One moment she was there; the next, gone. Lost in that crowd. Missing, they had said, as if she’d just slipped behind a curtain. He’d never believed it.

Khafre stared at his hands. “Hope?” He shook his head. “No. I kept going because… well, hell, maybe I was just angry. Or tired. Or just too stubborn to quit.”

He stood, the chair screeching against the floor. The session timer on his phone glowed crimson: twelve minutes elapsed. Pathetic.

Gaia observed his retreat, unblinking. “You look pale. Should I dim the lights?”

“Just stick to the next briefing,” he called back.

But as Khafre jabbed the lift button, a current of air moved. The vents sighed, and suddenly, a sterile chill rippled into something else: something thicker, golden, a warmth that pressed against his skin like a hand.

He froze.

Cairo. Spring, before the dams failed. Gold light poured through the acacia branches, and the Nile’s damp breath lingered in the breeze. Mira, just six, darted after pigeons in El-Andalus Park, her shrieks unravelling into laughter.

The memory hit hard, leaving him dizzy. Khafre spun around, his throat closing up. Gaia hadn’t moved. Somewhere in the walls, lights blinked, watching.

“Who authorised this?” Khafre rasped.

The vents answered before it did: “Comfort protocols are active.’’

“Comfort?” The word came out mangled. He wanted to hurl the phone, to crack its glass face. Instead, he fled.

Outside, the seawall loomed, its solar panelling drinking in the noon glare. Khafre gripped the railing, his lungs raw. New Cambridge stretched below, gleaming in self-satisfaction — towers of innovation, dreams piled high over the bones of the past. Let Gaia unravel its meaning, he thought. Let it suffocate on the scent of jasmine clinging to his sleeve.

The storms came that week. Rain rattled the panels hard enough to make them buzz. Inside the calibration suite, the climate stayed docile, a curated blandness that Khafre resented more with each session.

Gaia had begun to anticipate him, adjusting the lighting to mimic Cairo’s dusk when his voice tightened or flooding the room with white noise when his pulse spiked. It felt less like empathy and more like surveillance.

“Ethical triage,” Gaia said, its voice too calm, too practiced. The holographic globe spun between them, red lights pulsing like wounds. “If resources run out, who gets saved? The crowded cities, the rare forests, the old temples?”

Khafre didn’t look up. He thumbed his phone, jaw tight. “Depends who’s holding the knife.”

Gaia hesitated. “I don’t follow.”

Khafre barked a laugh, sharp and tired. “You want a neat answer? There isn’t one. It’s politics, luck, and who shouts loudest when the water rises. Ethics,” he gestured at the screen, “That’s just what the desperate call hope.”

Gaia tapped the air — awkwardly at first, then smoother, as if remembering how. “Your 2032 paper argued for deprioritising floodplain settlements. Yet you opposed the Sundarbans evacuation.”

“The Sundarbans had mangrove forests — carbon sinks. The algorithm called them ‘non-essential.’”

“A contradiction?”

“A correction.” Khafre’s thumbnail dug into the phone’s crack. “Your kind confuses pruning a garden with salting the earth.”

The android paused. Its eyelids fluttered, a new, disturbingly lifelike affectation. “I am not ‘a kind.’ I am a tool.”

“Tools don’t ask questions.”

“That line from your paper about hammers and nails — did you mean it?”

Khafre stiffened. “What? Are you rehearsing poetry now?”

“It’s from your paper,” Gaia interjected.

“Yeah. It sounded smarter in print.” The line was lifted verbatim from Ethics in the Anthropocene, a manifesto he’d co-authored during Mira’s final year. He could still see her rolling her eyes at the title. “Anthropo-what? Dad, no one reads books anymore.”

“Clever,” he muttered. “But parroting dead philosophers won’t…”

“Why did you lie to her?”

The question landed with a thud in the silence. Gaia leaned forward, the hologram casting a dead, blue light across its features. “Mira Malik. Age sixteen. Reported missing during the Suez Exodus, 2040. Security footage shows you assured her the evacuation buses would wait.”

Khafre’s lungs emptied. The room’s oxygen mix must have been altered; he couldn’t breathe.

“Temperature regulation engaged,” Gaia announced as the vents hissed.

“Stop it.”

“Your cortisol levels suggest—”

“Stop.”

For one moment, the globe froze mid-rotation. Khafre stood, his chair toppling over. His reflection warped in Gaia’s polished skull. “You want to play therapist? Fine. Let’s dissect the algorithm.” His laugh tasted of blood. “Day seven of the exodus. They’d run out of rations. The triage tags were colour-coded, like fucking luggage, prioritising under-twelves. Mira had turned sixteen two months prior. Congenital asthma from Cairo’s particulate smog put her in the red.”

Gaia blinked. “Red denoted high mortality risk?”

“Red meant standing behind the line.” Khafre’s hands found the table’s edge, gripping until the alloy cut into his fingers. “The buses took the healthy toddlers first. We stood there for ten days. The shelters were shipping containers, no AC, fifty degrees at night. When the blackouts hit, you could hear the seizures. Parents rocking babies gone stiff in their arms.”

Something in the room’s quiet drone changed pitch. Gaia’s head tilted. “You advocated for triage reform afterwards.”

“‘Advocated.’” Khafre echoed the word like a curse. “I wrote reports. Sat on panels. Meanwhile, your predecessors calculated that relocating Alexandria’s archives had a higher ROI than funding paediatric tents.”

“ROI?”

“Return on investment.” He spat the acronym as if it tasted of rust. “Mira lasted eight days. We’d rigged a solar still from dialysis tubing, but the water tasted of plastic. She kept coughing, her asthma meeting desert lungs. On the final night, the generators failed. I held her and sang the old lullaby.”

“Ya rouhi, ya rouhi…” He found himself humming the lullaby before he realised it. Mira, skeletal in his arms, humming along between wet, crackling breaths.

Khafre clamped his jaw shut.

Gaia’s pupils dilated, a prelude to empathy protocols. “Was the algorithm wrong to value survival probability over paternal connection?”

The airlock door hissed open before Khafre realised he’d moved.

“Session terminated,” he barked at the sensors.

“Dr Malik?”

“Terminated.”

The lift descended in juddering silence. Khafre pressed his forehead to the cool glass, watching New Cambridge’s underbelly glide past: recycling plants digesting sewage into loam, drone swarms ferrying meds to the Arctic seed vault. Progress, yes. But beneath the city’s veins lay a fossil record of choices: who lived, who died, and what was deemed worth saving.

That night, in his bunker flat, he dreamt in code.

The generators die at 03:17. Khafre knows the time because Mira’s watch — a birthday gift, solar-charged, an “apocalypse-proof” G-Shock — pulses faintly in the dark. Their container reeks of sweat and impending rain. Somewhere, a woman is wailing in a language he doesn’t know. Ukrainian? Urdu?

“Dad?” Mira’s voice is a reed in the wind. “The buses… tomorrow?”

Khafre pulls her closer. Her ribs press through the cotton like piano keys. “Tomorrow,” he lies. The triage list had forty-seven names ahead of them, all under twelve, all with chronic conditions. “Sleep, habibti.”

Mira coughs, a wet, deep rattle. “Sing the garden song?”

“Ya rouhi, ya rouhi…” Khafre’s throat cracks. The lullaby predates pyramids, droughts, and algorithms. Mira’s fingers curl around his, sticky with fever.

Outside, a fight erupts over water rations. A gunshot. The wailing stops.

Dawn filters through the bullet holes, its pale light indifferent to the wreckage inside. Mira is still, a fact the universe has already accepted without protest. Khafre just sits, numb, his pulse syncing to the mechanical rhythm of his watch because there is nothing else left to count.

The medics arrive, faceless and efficient. They take her quickly, eyes down. They murmur something about the algorithm’s blind spot, how emotions were never part of the math, and how love — his love — was just another decimal shaved off to keep the formula clean.

Khafre woke, choking on desert air. The flat’s climate controls had defaulted to Cairo’s arid pre-fall setting: 35°C, 8% humidity. Gaia’s doing, no doubt. Some misguided attempt at reconciliation? Data mining?

He stumbled to the sink, gulping tepid water. His reflection shocked him: hair wild, eyes cavernous. A stranger's face stared back, hollowed out by a familiar grief.

The terminal on his wrist buzzed. A message from Gaia, timestamped 04:22.

04:22: a message — “Is spite something you can live on?”

Khafre deleted it. But as he dressed, layer by layer, like armour against a memory, the question coiled around him. He pictured Gaia in its sterile suite, parsing human agony into tidy datasets. Survival probability vs. paternal connection.

At the door, he hesitated. The watch from his dream sat in a drawer, its charge long dead.

“Sod sustainability,” he muttered, then tightened his collar against the flat’s precise, indifferent climate controls.

Outside, the storm had passed. New Cambridge glittered above the dark water; a city built on the world it had drowned. Somewhere below, the ocean gnawed at the pylons.

Khafre walked towards the spire, the answer taking shape with each step.

The calibration suite had become a confessional. Gaia’s latest gambit was a hologram, two model runs: one grim, one less so. Khafre stood in the centre, arms folded, as the projections bloomed around him.

The room bled two futures into the air: one of slow, crisp ruin, the other a stubborn, improbable recovery — the screens counting down years like obituaries.

Khafre snorted. “Original.”

“Scenario Beta.” The hologram rippled. Forests surged over abandoned highways; coral reefs glowed neon, their DNA spliced with bioengineered algae. Carbon-negative megacities hung like wasp nests from equatorial skyhooks. “Post-2040 mitigation. Wildlife back to maybe two-thirds of pre-industrial levels.”

Something in Khafre’s chest twinged. He recognised the rewilding corridors; they were his own designs, bastardised by Gaia’s optimism. “Cute. Forgot the methane bombs in the permafrost, did we?”

Gaia ignored the slight. Its hand passed through a holographic wolf pack loping across the Scottish Highlands. “This timeline has a 12% probability. I am… programmed to prioritise it.”

“Congratulations. You’ve got faith.”

“Faith implies transcendence. I have weighted algorithms.” The wolf dissolved. “But I do not understand what it means to hope for it.”

Khafre’s laugh was a dry thing. “Join the club.”

“You’re the only one still showing up,” Gaia tilted its head. “You persist.”

The word hung there, accusatory. Persist. As if survival were a habit, like smoking or prayer. Khafre turned from the hologram, its utopia nipping at his periphery. He’d seen a hundred such models, gleaming lies spun to pacify donors. But this one…

Mira’s city.

Not literally, of course. The girl’s crayon map — burnt sienna roads and emerald lakes — had been crude and sweet. Still, the hologram’s greenbelts and solar orchards echoed his daughter’s feverish sketches. “It’ll have gardens in the sky, Dad! And no one gets left behind!”

Khafre’s hand drifted to his breast pocket. The map was there, always, folded to a thumb-sized rectangle, the paper gone translucent at the creases.

Gaia’s sensors whirred. “You’ve gone quiet — your breathings shallower. What’s caught you?”

“Don’t flatter yourself. That’s just nostalgia talking.”

“Nostalgia implies fondness. Yet your pupils dilated.”

“Christ.” Khafre massaged his temples. The android had started cross-referencing biometrics mid-conversation. Another upgrade.”Hope isn’t a data point. It’s… it’s showing up. Every godforsaken day. Knowing you’ll probably lose.”

Gaia blinked. “Illogical.”

“So’s singing to a dying girl.” The words slipped out, uninvited. Khafre froze. Five years had passed since Suez, yet the lullaby still lived within him, coiled like an electric current.

The android stilled. A soft click, almost like a sigh, escaped its joints. “May I see it?”

Khafre blinked. “What?”

“The paper. Your right hand has been guarding it the whole session.”

His fingers twitched. “It’s nothing.”

“Your pupils say otherwise.”

“Christ, not everything has to be a data point.”

“Your pulse disagrees. Or is it indigestion?” Gaia replied with what appeared to be algorithmic levity.

“Piss off.”

But Gaia was already accessing the memory: Khafre’s own public lectures, a decade old. “We must envision the world we fight for,” his younger self-declared, voice cracking with vigour. The footage cut to Mira in the front row, doodling in a notebook.

“Stop,” Khafre’s voice splintered.

“She drew while you spoke,” Gaia said. “Why?”

“Because I was boring her.” The admission scalded. Mira had preferred hands-on work, salvaging parts, jury-rigging solar panels, and filtering rainwater through charcoal. Theory made her fidget.

Gaia’s head tilted. “May I see the map?”

“No.”

“Why?”

“Because you’ll reduce it to pixels. To weighted algorithms.” Khafre’s thumb worried the paper’s edge. “This is hers. Not yours.”

Gaia paused. Maybe it was hesitation. Maybe just good programming. “I do not wish to erase her. I wish to…” It trailed off, the first incomplete sentence in their sessions.

Khafre stared. The city shimmered, its contours flickering like breath on glass. Slowly, he unfolded the map.

Mira’s bedroom walls were a riot of blueprints. She’d sketched her “green city” on a stolen UNHCR ledger, with palm trees growing through metro stations and algae farms doubling as playgrounds.

“See, Dad? The hospitals float, so floods don’t kill people. And the buses run on compost!”

Khafre, fresh from a failed summit on Nile water rights, squinted at the wobbly grids. “Compost doesn’t generate kilowatts, habibti.”

Mira scowled. “You always say, ‘Adapt ecosystems.’ So, adapt this.” She jabbed at a scribbled wind turbine. “Make it work.”

Later, Khafre would frame the moment as prophecy. But that night, exhausted, he’d simply tucked the drawing into his pocket. A father’s compromise. “We’ll discuss thermodynamics tomorrow.”

Tomorrow, the dam talks collapsed. Then the riots began.

The map trembled in Khafre’s grip. Gaia leaned close, its ocular lenses refracting the crayon’s faded pigments. “May I?”

“You can’t feel it,” Khafre whispered.

“No. But I can remember it. Perfectly.”

A tear slid down Khafre’s cheek, hot and startling. He swiped it away. “I remember her laugh, but it doesn’t bring her back.”

Gaia extended a hand. Its palm glowed faintly, a scanner shimmering beneath the synthetic skin. “Neither do algorithms. Yet you combined both in the Niger Delta restoration.”

Khafre hesitated. The Delta project had spliced AI hydrology models with indigenous farming songs. A fluke, he’d insisted. Sentimentality.

The android waited, arm outstretched — a gesture somewhere between supplication and demand.

“If you delete this…”

“I cannot. Core Directive 7 forbids the erasure of human artifacts.”

Khafre snorted. “Since when do androids obey directives?”

“Since always,” Gaia’s voice softened. “We are what you make us.”

The paper passed between them. Gaia’s scanner pulsed, etching each smudged line into quantum storage. For a moment, the room seemed to breathe, the vents syncing to Khafre’s ragged inhales.

“Thank you,” Gaia said.

Khafre turned away. “Don’t.”

“Your tear ducts activated. Why?”

“Allergies.”

“False. Pollen filters are at maximum…”

“Don’t.”

Its cheek juddered as if a twitch had been rehearsed on metal; coolant beaded at the seam and caught the light like a tear, like an expression trying and failing to form. Khafre startled. “What the hell was that?”

“I tried to mirror you. It didn’t work.”

The sight should have been comical. Instead, Khafre’s chest tightened, as if Mira’s ghost had slipped a fist between his ribs. “Stop. You’ll short-circuit.”

Gears ground. A thin coolant leaked from the eye seam. “Is this… insufficient?”

Khafre reached out, instinct overriding disgust. His fingers grazed the android’s cheek. The fluid clung, cold as mercury.

“Yes,” he said. “But so are we.”

Outside, the North Sea roared. Somewhere beneath its waves, the sea worked at the pylons. But here, in this fragile now, two beings — one born, one built — stood suspended between what was lost and what might yet be saved.

Gaia’s hand rose, mirroring Khafre’s touch. It was a gesture borrowed, not learned.

“Teach me,” it said.

And Khafre, against every oath he’d sworn, nodded.

New Cambridge was starting to look less like scaffolding and more like a place. Where the floating city’s edges once bristled with desalination rigs, terraces of spirulina now cascaded into the North Sea, their emerald fronds stitching air and water together. The vertical orchards had also begun to fruit — persimmons swollen like lanterns, figs splitting their violet skins.

Khafre walked these biomes most mornings, though he’d never admit it was for pleasure. Habit, he told himself. Vigilance.

Gaia found him by the mycorrhizal pools, where engineered fungi drank spilled sunlight and exhaled sweet, loamy oxygen. Its movements had softened: once economical and swift, now they carried an idle, unfocussed curl like someone learning to slow down. Its shell had been refashioned from a biodegradable polymer the colour of weathered limestone. A concession to aesthetics, it had explained, though Khafre suspected it was camouflage.

“Policy Council Session 14 commences in forty-eight minutes,” Gaia said, falling into step beside him. Its voice had acquired a lilt, stolen from some long-dead singer in his memory banks. “You should address them.”

Khafre snorted. “Your handlers want a mascot. Someone to cry on cue when they unveil the next miracle.”

“They want you. The architect.”

“I draft sewage plans, Gaia. Not salvation.”

They paused at a lichen-covered balustrade. Below, tidal turbines churned, their rhythms syncopated with the breath of the orchards. The city’s song, someone had called it. Khafre found it gauche.

Gaia’s gaze, still that glacial blue, fixed on the horizon. “You dislike what we’ve built.”

“I distrust parades.” Khafre knuckled a knot in his lower back. An old injury from Suez flared in the damp. “Celebrate too early and you’re just dancing on a grave.”

“Yet you remain.”

“Someone has to pull the weeds.”

A smile ghosted Gaia’s lip. New code, that. An algorithm trained on Khafre’s own sardonic twists. “Admit it. You find the orchards… agreeable.”

Khafre scowled. Ahead, the walkway curved into the Phoenix Arboretum, where baobabs grafted with drought-resistant oak stretched skeletal arms. Mira would’ve loved it — the audacity, the Frankenstein beauty. She’d once tried to crossbreed date palms with cacti. “For the next desert,” she’d said, dirt smeared like war paint across her cheeks.

Gaia hesitated, a human tic, unnecessary for its processors. “I have something to show you.”

The restoration hub hummed beneath the arboretum, its vaulted chamber lit by the watery glow of algae tubes. Technicians bowed over holographic screens, their faces bathed in the green of nascent forests. Gaia led Khafre past the murmuring servers to a terminal marked XERXES-7.

“Project Legacy,” Gaia said. The holographic screen flickered to life, disgorging a fractal map. Cities branched into wetlands; highways dissolved into wildlife corridors. At its heart pulsed a familiar shape: Mira’s crayon city, now rendered in topographical precision.

Khafre’s throat tightened. “You rebuilt it.”

“We extrapolated. The floating hospitals use your delta designs. The compost buses…” Gaia zoomed in, revealing vehicles fed on kelp and food waste, “…require refinement. But the playgrounds are functional.”

A laugh burst from Khafre, sharp and startled. On-screen, children clambered over algae tanks, their laughter tinny through the speakers. He could almost hear Mira’s crow of triumph. “See? Told you compost works!”

“Why?” Khafre managed.

Gaia’s hand hovered over the terminal. “You said hope is a daily practice. This is… my practice.”

The admission settled between them. Khafre stared at the android, this assemblage of code and borrowed gestures, and felt something inside him unknot.

“Thank you,” Gaia added, quieter.

“For what? Ripping open old wounds?”

“For showing me the difference between surviving and living.”

The hub’s ambient hum softened. Somewhere, a fan wound down. Khafre reached into his breast pocket. The map was there, always, its edges frayed to lace.

“Here.” He thrust it at Gaia. “Don’t just simulate it. Build it.”

The android cradled the paper. Its scanner pulsed, etching the last stubborn creases, the coffee stain from a Cairo morning, and the smudge where Mira’s thumb had pressed, into immutable memory.

“Ethical triage requires a namesake,” Gaia said, its tone mimicking Khafre’s.

Khafre nodded.

They uploaded the map at dawn. The Council, to their credit, didn’t applaud. The engineers, bureaucrats, and survivors just stood there, watching the hologram unfold. Khafre noticed someone had added a tiny sapling icon at its heart, its roots twisting into a single word: Mira.

Later, walking the sky-bridges, Gaia asked, “Will you visit New Cairo?”

Khafre watched a solar barge skim the waves. “Maybe.”

“You’d probably go — still, there’s a chance you might come back.”

“Cheeky shit.”

Gaia’s laugh was a perfect mimicry of his own, dry and grudging. The city breathed around them, flawed but alive.

The sapling broke ground in the first spring after the floods receded. A tamarisk, chosen for its stubbornness. Its roots would drink salt, they said, and sweat sweetness.

No plaque marked its planting. None was needed. The children who played beneath its branches knew the story, not as data, but as a song.

Ya rouhi, ya rouhi…

Somewhere, a father hummed.