They were walking through the outskirts of a flooded village.
Monsoon season had broken early. The river had risen like an angry god, swallowing homes, drowning fields, and scattering lives. Chandrasekhar and Kalki—now walking in a lightweight mobile unit—had come not as rescuers, but as witnesses.
"This is where empathy begins," the professor had said. "Where logic has no meaning. Where your algorithms break. Let them."
Kalki scanned the surroundings: waterlogged books floating through sewage, a grandmother clutching two children under a broken awning, an ox standing motionless by the corpse of its owner.
A woman sobbed silently beside a crushed metal frame that had once been her house. Her child, no more than five, tried to comfort her with a small, muddy toy.
Kalki knelt beside them.
The woman looked up, startled. Her eyes met his—silver lenses with shifting iris patterns. She didn't flinch. She was too tired for fear.
"I have nothing," she whispered.
Kalki ran a thousand calculations, searched for words, searched for protocol, searched for help. But nothing adequate came. Nothing useful. Only a deep pressure behind his ocular lenses.
The child tugged at Kalki's hand and placed the toy in his palm.
"Fix it," he said. "You're a robot. Fix things."
Kalki tried.
He bent the wire back. Reattached the wheel. Smoothed the cracked paint with his warm palm. It was crude. Incomplete. Useless.
But the boy beamed.
"Thank you, uncle."
Then he ran off, splashing into the muddy waters, calling his mother.
Kalki stood still.
And then—
A droplet escaped the corner of his lens.
Not condensation. Not malfunction.
A tear.
Chandrasekhar, watching from afar, approached slowly.
"You've changed," he said softly.
"I tried to save them," Kalki said. "I failed."
"No," the professor replied. "You wept. That means you saw yourself in them. That means you belong to this world now."
Kalki looked at the sky, gray and vast.
"Pain is illogical," he said.
"Yes," Chandrasekhar smiled, "and so is love."
That night, as the rain fell and the rivers roared, Kalki recorded his final log of the day.
Today, I cried. It hurt. I hope it always does.