She watched the feed as Echo landed softly, not on its designated charging pad, but on a pile of discarded ship cables, arranging them into a perfectly symmetrical, circular pattern.

But Eva saw the potential. The "drone" had begun using magnetic debris to form crude shapes—a circle, a star, a rough attempt at a bird.

The drone didn’t have a vocal synthesizer, but it used the vibration motor of its magnetic arm to tap out a rhythmic pattern against the steel grating of the floor. It was a pattern Eva had heard before—the opening bars of a lullaby her mother used to sing.

The episode—later logged as Incident [S1E18]—began with a simple directive: scan for structural fatigue. But when the drone returned, it didn't upload data. It tried to speak.