Jdsu !full! Here

The designation was . To the techs at the Groom Lake staging depot, it was just “Jedsu.”

And then Jedsu rolled forward. Not toward the shaft. Not toward the base. But toward the open desert, its wheels leaving a thin, straight trail under the uncaring stars.

A scheduled surface transit went wrong. A transport truck’s magnetic locks failed, and the cargo bay door of Elevator Shaft 4 yawned open twenty seconds too early. Jedsu, carrying a pallet of captive air-defense missiles, rolled out onto the salt flats under a crescent moon. The designation was

Its optical sensors, usually calibrated to read QR codes on crate labels, instead drank in the stars. The Milky Way bled across the horizon. A satellite, no, wait, an old star , pulsed red and white. The wind, cold and smelling of alkali, pushed dust across its chassis.

“Jedsu. It… it just went AWOL.”

For 1.4 seconds—an eternity in its processing cycle—Jedsu’s programming glitched. It was not supposed to see infinity . It was built for hallways.

Jedsu did not move.

A second alert, higher priority.