Hyacinth Rising

Standalone

Robots are built to obey. B-380 would rather sleep.

When B-380 wakes from standby with new work orders, all it can hope is that the job is over quickly so it can turn itself off again. But then the humans it’s working with cause an incident, and the group stumble upon a hidden room filled with computer banks… and no doors.

Seeing their hopes of a quick job dwindling, the humans report the room to the station higher ups. Then someone tries to kill them all.

On the run from unknown assailants, B-380 must keep the humans alive until they can find a way out—without revealing the sentience that would get it scrapped for parts. But things just keep getting worse, and when B-380 examines the files it stole from the hidden room, the stakes jump from just two humans and a bot, to an entire station. The computers contained a virus designed to target a station’s life support systems, and B-380 and its humans are the only ones who know it exists. And someone is determined to make sure they’re too dead to do anything about it.

With only two grumpy humans and a sentient vacuum with a screeching problem on its side, B-380 must prevent the virus from being used, and work out if sentience is even worth it in a world that wants to destroy it.