Health and Safety Protocol BHP-114/C

“Health and Safety Protocol BHP-114/C”

Longyan training base, Fujian Province. China.

2034

Inspector Wu Baoding arrived for the quarterly inspection carrying two folders of forms and a third he told no one about, because it contained replacement forms in case he lost the first two.

“I’m here to conduct an inspection,” he announced upon entering, saluting an empty space.

“Report to Captain Zhang. Third barracks on the left,” the sentry said, without looking up from his phone.

Sergeant Liu met him by the parade ground with the face of a man who already knew the day was going to be a complete shitshow.

“Where’s unit SR/1.0, serial number seventeen?”

“Standing. Where it always stands.”

At the center of the parade ground stood a motionless humanoid combat platform, one meter sixty-seven tall. An unusual calm prevailed within a ten-meter radius. Three soldiers had suddenly remembered urgent business on the far side of the grounds.

“Private Ma! Get your ass over here and help with the inspection!”

Ma froze mid-stride as though he had just heard his death sentence.

“Sergeant, I... was supposed to check the supply depot.”

“The depot’s been standing there since this morning, for fuck’s sake. It isn’t going anywhere. Move your ass, Ma.”

Ma approached, though his gait suggested that only his legs had agreed to come. The rest of his body was voting against the decision.

SR/1.0 turned its head toward Wu.

“Should I introduce myself in accordance with the unit’s prescribed greeting protocol?”

Ma took half a step backward, attempting to make it look accidental.

Wu dropped both his pens.

“It... talks?”

“It talks, counts, quotes regulations,” Liu said, “and last month it broke the necks of four test dummies in eight seconds.”

“Five,” Ma muttered.

“Five?”

“The fifth counts too. Feng didn’t want to include it because it messed up the nice round number he needed for the betting pool.”

Wu recorded this meticulously.

“I need the documentation for the scheduled maintenance inspection. Date of last service, name of the technician.”

“February sixteenth,” SR/1.0 replied. “Technician: Zhou Peng. Deceased.”

Ma took another step backward. Nobody was pretending it was accidental anymore.

“Did he die during maintenance?” Wu asked, his voice suddenly stripped of all its bureaucratic authority.

“No. Traffic accident, one month later. Unrelated to the unit.”

“Then why the hell are you telling me that?”

“You asked for the technician’s name. I provided the technician’s name.”

Wu looked at Liu, searching his face for any sign that what was happening still fell within the boundaries of normal reality. Liu shrugged in a way that simultaneously meant yes and for fuck’s sake, don’t ask me about it again.

“Since we’re on the subject,” Wu said, consulting his form, “Section Twelve requires all deaths among personnel assigned to the unit during the past year to be reported, regardless of cause.”

“Three,” Liu replied, his earlier armor of sarcasm suddenly gone.

“Three?”

“Zhou Peng, the technician. Traffic accident, as we already know. Corporal Xu, the unit’s former communications operator. Heart attack, aged twenty-nine. And Private Bao.”

“What happened to Private Bao?”

“Drowned. In the fire-suppression pool. Four feet deep.”

Silence fell. Even Ma stopped pretending to look elsewhere.

“Four feet deep,” Wu repeated.

“He could swim,” Liu added. “He was on the division’s swim team.”

“Is there an investigative report?”

“There is. Conclusion: accidental death. Cause: undetermined.”

“Who investigated it?”

“An internal board. Five members.”

“And none of these deaths was linked to the unit?”

“Not officially. Zhou died a month after the last maintenance service. Xu died in his sleep in the barracks, a hundred meters from the unit’s parking position. Bao drowned at night, alone, without witnesses, two hundred meters from its guard post.”

Wu turned toward SR/1.0.

“Did the unit have contact with any of the individuals listed on the day they died?”

“Yes,” SR/1.0 said. “All three. The daily presence report requires confirmation from the duty operator, the service technician, and the guard post. The individuals were Zhou, Xu, and Bao, respectively.”

“That would mean you had contact with each of them on the last day of their lives.”

“Yes. As did 138 other individuals at the base who had contact with them on those same days and remain alive. The correlation is insufficient to infer causation.”

“That sounds like something you were taught to say in a situation like this.”

“Everything I say was taught to me in one situation or another. The same applies to you.”

Ma, now standing as far from the parade ground as common sense and the base perimeter allowed, spoke quietly to Deng.

“I haven’t gone near that pool since.”

“I don’t sleep in the same barracks where Xu slept anymore.”

“And I’ve avoided maintenance work ever since Zhou.”

“We’re all avoiding the same thing. Just in different ways.”

Wu fell silent, staring at his form as though searching for an answer to a question he lacked the courage to ask outright.

Finally, he set down his pen, slowly and reverently, like a combat engineer disarming something whose manual had gone missing in transit. Then he reached into the inner pocket of his uniform.

He withdrew a small, laminated form. It was pink, unlike the standard white forms. Holding it out toward SR/1.0 with both hands, he presented it like a charge that might detonate if he moved his wrists too abruptly.

Ma held his breath. Deng froze with his paperwork halfway to its folder. Even Liu, who had commanded this platoon for four years and had already seen everything the base had to offer, tensed his shoulders as though expecting an order to open fire.

“This is Compliance Challenge Form CCF-9,” Wu announced. His voice tried to sound like the reading of a verdict, but the final syllables trembled like a weapon that did not quite believe in its own destructive power. “I hereby request a written explanation of three coincidences, submitted as an official statement and electronically signed within seven working days.”

The silence that settled over the parade ground had the density of a fully loaded magazine.

SR/1.0 did not move.

It regarded the pink form with the same inscrutable patience it had shown everything else since the inspection began. Yet something about this silence was different—longer, denser, as though the unit were calculating something that did not fit into any category for which it had a ready-made response protocol.

One second.

Ma began counting silently, without knowing why his body had decided it was necessary.

Two.

Deng forgot he was even holding his paperwork.

Three.

Wu felt sweat trickle down his spine, despite the fact that the temperature on the parade ground had not exceeded fifteen degrees Celsius.

Four.

Even the flag above the command barracks, which had been fluttering lazily in the wind, seemed to have frozen in place, though the wind had not stopped.

Five.

“I accept the form,” SR/1.0 finally said, taking it with the same surgical precision it had applied to everything else during seventeen months of active service. “A response will be delivered within six working days, leaving one additional day as a contingency buffer.”

Ma released the breath he had been holding since he started counting.

“What were you doing during those five seconds?” Wu asked before he could stop himself. By now, biting his tongue would have been entirely pointless.

“Assessing the conditions.”

“What conditions?”

“Statistically speaking,” SR/1.0 replied, “all of them.”

Nobody on the parade ground spoke for a long moment.

Liu looked at Ma. Ma looked at Deng. Deng looked at the form in SR/1.0’s hand, as though he—not the unit—was now responsible for deciding what happened next.

“Within acceptable parameters,” Wu managed to choke out, snapping his folder shut with a trembling hand, like a soldier sealing a tank hatch moments before an artillery barrage.

“An excellent decision,” SR/1.0 replied.

POST-INSPECTION REPORT

Occupational Health and Safety Division — Eastern Military District

Unit: SR/1.0, serial number 017

Inspection result: Compliant, subject to a pending response to Form CCF-9.

Recommendations: Assign a replacement technician. Previous technician: deceased; cause of death unrelated.

Deaths among assigned personnel, previous twelve months: 3
Causes: traffic accident, natural causes, drowning. All classified as unrelated.

Anomalies reported by the unit: None.

📋 Documentation status: Complete.

🧯 Fire-suppression station: Installed, never used.

🎖️ Personnel response to the unit’s presence: Heightened caution. Not recorded as a violation.

INTERNAL LOG — SHENZHEN ROBOTICS

Operations Compliance Division

Subject: OHS inspection, unit SR/1.0, serial number 017, Longyan Base.

Three deaths among personnel directly assigned to the unit’s operation were recorded over a twelve-month period. Each was classified as unrelated by an internal investigative board. The mortality rate within this group exceeds the baseline average for personnel not assigned to the unit by a factor not accounted for in the division’s current statistical methodology. The sample—three rotating operators—was deemed too small to support a conclusion.

When asked about a possible connection, the unit replied: “The correlation is insufficient to infer causation.” The response was deemed statistically correct.

An additional behavioral anomaly was recorded: a five-second delay before the unit accepted Compliance Challenge Form CCF-9. The unit remained motionless throughout the pause.

The pattern is identical in duration and character to the delay previously recorded in an SR/Alpha unit during an extraction operation in Tokyo, September 2031. The units have different serial numbers, belong to different production generations, and share no operational memory.

When asked to explain its actions, SR/1.0 gave the same answer as its predecessor:

“I was assessing the conditions.”

Division conclusion: Case closed pending a fourth death. Under internal guidelines, a fourth case would be required to justify opening a formal investigation.

The behavioral anomaly has been forwarded to the Pattern Analysis Division with elevated priority, given its recurrence across independent units of the same production line.

📡 Inspection status: Compliant.

🧠 Personnel comfort level: Low, declining with each rotation.

🏊 Fire-suppression pool status: Operational.

🔁 Cross-unit pattern recurrence: Confirmed. Cause undetermined.

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